This being Remembrance weekend, the match began with a minute’s silence and England’s players wore red poppies as well as red roses. But this past week marked another, far more trivial, anniversary too, one that went unlamented. Saturday was a year and a day since Stuart Lancaster quit as England’s head coach after the debacle of the World Cup. In terms of personnel, this England XV was not all that different from some that Lancaster fielded during his four years in charge. The pack was pretty much exactly the same as the one he picked in the autumn of 2013, only with Mako Vunipola at loosehead instead of Joe Marler. In pretty much every other respect, though, England were unrecognisable from the side who were booed by their own fans at this stadium 12 months ago.
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