Rugby Union: World Cup becomes Carling's priority: Captain cool

KING WILLIAM held court yesterday as his England team gathered in London for Saturday's Calcutta Cup match in Scotland and immediately established that his priority was not three days and 400 miles, but 16 months and 6,000 miles away: next year's World Cup in South Africa, which will be his last hurrah as captain.

Will Carling's priority may seem patently obvious but the deliberate downgrading of such an emotionally charged occasion as Scotland v England flies in the face of conventional wisdom that the best long-term planning is the short-term expedient of winning the next game.

Thus, according to the thoughts of captain Carling, Murrayfield is but a step on the journey and in the interim English ambition is purportedly much more modest than it has been since the Eighties. 'The most important thing is to build long term and get things right for 1995,' he said.

'It would be lovely on the way to win more games than we lose but we have to be brave and strong enough to think that '95 is the ultimate goal. I'd like to win but along the way things will go wrong. You can't expect perfection for 18 months.'

This was relentlessly downbeat considering that last time out England beat New Zealand but Carling is in the business of talking down English prospects, not least so that the

hubris of which England admit they were guilty in 1990 is not repeated four years on. But with Scotland having recently lost to Wales and the All Blacks by record scores, it does sound as faintly ridiculous as it does becomingly modest.

'You say to a Scot 'England will put 30 points on you' and they'll go berserk before they lie down in front of England,' Carling said. The difference in 1990, when England were

denied a Grand Slam at Murrayfield, is that that Scotland team were good enough to do the Slam instead.

Carling had invited the usual journalistic crowd, all of whom had heard him countless times before, and we all dutifully turned up. Saturday's game will be his 37th as captain, a figure that beats the

international record of Australia's Nick Farr-Jones.

Barring injury, loss of form and newly emergent talent - all of which he cited as possible threats - Carling's captaincy total will reach its half-century at the World Cup. And that, at the tender age of 29, will be that. 'There is a finite period in which you can hold that kind of job,' said the man who once wondered how on earth he could manage to play for England and not be captain.

'I'd love to carry on to the World Cup but there is more and more competition. There are no guarantees for anyone. After that I find it very doubtful I would carry on as captain. Whether I'd carry on playing I don't know.'

By then Carling imagines his team will have developed into prospective world, as well as Five Nations, champions. But he is not quite sure. 'Eighteen months before the last World Cup we had a very settled side who had developed a style of play.

'This time we have a new side who have yet to develop a style of play. There is tremendous potential within this side but there is a difference between having potential and succeeding.' The new side trained at The Stoop yesterday and leave for Edinburgh this afternoon.

Carling has been captain so long - since November 1988 - that it is hard to imagine anyone else as England captain, though Rob Andrew did do it in Romania in 1989 when Carling was injured. 'There's nothing tangible to it and it doesn't make any difference to the England boys,' Carling said. 'They'll still fall asleep in the team talks.'