Earlier today, England's disastrous Rugby World Cup saw a major casualty as Stuart Lancaster resigned as head coach.
It leaves the RFU seeking a replacement to lift a team which crashed out of the tournament on home soil at the pool stage and their situation was one of the talking points on tonight's Wednesday Night Rugby on Off The Ball as The Guardian's Robert Kitson joined us and The Irish Times' rugby correspondent Gerry Thornley on the show.
"I think he was doing fine until the tour of New Zealand they had last year and he couldn't get his best side there because of the Cup final which clashed with the start of the tour and it all went wrong from there," said Kitson of Lancaster.
"He didn't know what his best side was, as Gerry says, and that gets worse and worse and then the Sam Burgess thing just complicated the thing terribly. When it disintegrated and goes wrong, it tends to go badly wrong."
England went to the tournament without Toulon's European champion Steffon Armitage due to the back-row being based overseas and Kitson mused whether Lancaster could have "twisted a few arms" to bring him in as Australia coach Michael Cheika did in the case of fellow Toulon player Matt Giteau.
"[Lancaster] did a lot of good things behind the scenes culturally but in that instance I don't think he was quite strong enough. It was blatanly obvious that England needed a bit more dynamism in the back-five of their scrum. Armitage would have provided that," said Kitson, who spoke about some of the potential replacements for Lancaster including Japan's World Cup head coach Eddie Jones.
Kitson and Gerry also cast an eye over the upcoming Champions Cup matches.
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