Clive Woodward compares 2003 Rugby World Cup winners to current England team and explains why his side were better

Sir Clive Woodward believes that England’s Rugby World Cup finalists still do not stack up against his 2003 side despite recording their first ever tournament victory over New Zealand in japan earlier this year.

Eddie Jones’s side produced a stunning performance in October to dominate the All Blacks and secure a 19-7 victory over the reigning world champions, only to come unstuck against South Africa the following week in the final and fail to match what Woodward’s side achieved 16 years prior.

Having missed out on the Webb Ellis Cup, the current crop of players know they have not yet joined the highest echelon reserved for the 2003 side, which featured the likes of Jonny Wilkinson, Lawrence Dallaglio and captain Martin Johnson.

However, Johnson himself admitted that what he saw in this year’s semi-final between England and the All Blacks was the best performance that he’s witnessed from the national team, but drew short of comparing the two sides as he did not wish to put two sides from different generations up against each other.

His head coach in 2003 was Woodward, credited with being the brains behind English rugby’s rise to the top of the game, and he was happy to do so when asked about how the two teams played the game.

“Even now looking back to 2003, I still think we were ahead of the current team in terms of the speed at which we played the game at, the physical condition the players were in and I think we did take the game to a whole new level,” Woodward told Simon Mundie on the BBC’s Don’t Tell Me The Score podcast.

“Look at the number of tries we scored, our win-lose ratio between World Cups was astonishing.

“That is why I think Eddie has done a good job. We have made some mistakes on who was coaching the team and what we have done ... there has been a big gap since 2003.”

Jones remains contracted to England through to the end of the 2020/21 season, halfway through the new World Cup cycle, but while the Rugby Football Union has expressed their interested in signing the Australian to an extension Jones himself has remained hush on the matter.

Jones did acknowledge in his recent autobiography that he is fully committed to his contract though, and also detailed a number of high-profile occasions throughout the World Cup campaign where he believes he got it right – such as the All Blacks week – and where he got it wrong in not making changes for the final.

One of his apparent masterstrokes was deploying mind games against the All Blacks in trying to talk up the pressure that was on them to retain the World Cup, something that he believes helped put New Zealand off their game as well as allow his side to prepare for the semi-final without such pressure. To do this, Jones drew up a plan to place certain stories in the media through his press conference appearances, and Woodward admitted that it is a tactic that he utilised himself when preparing to face Jones’s Australia side nearly two decades ago.

“I used to leak stuff to the press to make sure Eddie Jones in Australia was reading this because he’d be thinking, my god what are they doing now,” Woodward added.

“Sometimes it was exaggerating a bit but I knew the impact it was having. I didn’t want them to think we were just staying still and not learning.”