Richard Wigglesworth hits back at Will Carling’s England ‘data straitjacket’ claim

England senior assistant coach Richard Wigglesworth insists he will never be a slave to statistics and will continue to judge attacking performance by sight and feel.

During this year’s Six Nations, former England captain Will Carling accused Steve Borthwick’s team of being stuck in a “data straitjacket”. In an interview with the Telegraph Rugby Podcast, Wigglesworth rejected the idea the coaching staff are in thrall to the data, insisting it only ever acts as a supporting guide to his own instincts when it comes to assessing England’s attack.

“Obviously there is loads of data but I would only look at that after the sight test, so after I have looked at it live and on the computer to see what it looked like from a skill and structure point of view,” Wigglesworth says. “The data then comes after and then does it support or does it throw up anything that maybe you have missed? I would definitely go off the eye test and the feel of what it was and then bring in the stats afterwards to aid: do these back what I have seen or is this something that I might need to dig into.”

Since Carling stated that Borthwick’s side were playing a “formatted, constricted game” following a dispiriting 30-21 loss to Scotland, England’s attack has flourished in going toe-to-toe with Ireland, France and New Zealand. The performance in the 23-22 victory against Ireland at Twickenham has acted as a line in the sand for how England want to attack.

“Our desire to go and score and beat people and make line-breaks, that was the standard we set in that game,” Wigglesworth says. “We want to never dip below that.”

Heading into their Autumn Nations Series campaign against New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Japan, Wigglesworth says England will be targeting speed of ball - with a particular emphasis on the scrum-halves getting the ball away from the breakdown - and improving their forwards’ carrying skills.

“Our mentality is that we want to go and hurt teams and play as fast as we can,” Wigglesworth says. “Can I keep it really simple to allow players to do that? That’s the formula we are going to go with: we want to play really quick. We’ve got the players who have got magic in them and we’ve got talent so we want to be able use that.

“We chase speed like everyone else. We might measure it in a different way for our nines. We’ll measure the reload speed of them touching the ball to it leaving (the ruck). We try to improve our contact skills. We know that there are some teams who are ahead of us in that area, and any area where other teams are ahead of us we try to close the gap. So that is a focus for us because better contact skills means you get better carries, means you get more offloads and it means you get quicker ball. So that is something we are chasing.”