“The tournament needs England to do well,” Kyran Bracken says.
He’s not being unfairly arrogant, either. A member of England’s victorious Rugby World Cup squad in 2003, Bracken was watching from the bench as Jonny Wilkinson’s drop-goal saw off hosts Australia, and he knows the value of a host country going the distance.
“It’s not too different to Brazil at the football World Cup,” he notes. “It’s very important for a home country to do well. If England don’t do well I think the tournament will fall a bit flat on its face.”
The retired scrum-half continues to follow the national side extremely closely, and admits there is a different kind of pressure when playing a major championship on home soil.
“We were away from home in 2003, we were in Australia, we were ranked number one, and we actually expected ourselves to win,” he says.
“I don’t think the current England team expect to win, but they hope to win and they expect to get very far, so the pressures for them are slightly different. We’re the home nation, we should get to the end, we’ve got the team to do it so now’s the time to do it.”
The second group game, against Wales, will be the first real test of whether Stuart Lancaster’s team has what it takes to go the distance.
The opener against Fiji was not the cricket score that some more ambitious fans might have been expecting, but England got the job done, and now go into a crunch match against a rival weakened by the loss of some key names.
Leigh Halfpenny and Rhys Webb were both ruled out through injury shortly before their country’s World Cup bow against Uruguay, but the likes of Jamie Roberts are still capable of causing real damage, while the prospect of beating England is always enough to inspire Wales.
Bracken thinks it will be close – he predicts a 30-20 win for England – but admits that injuries can often help galvanise a team.
Now 43, Bracken is able to take in others’ perception of the England team from a distance and is reassuringly honest when accepting that there tends to be a target on players’ backs.
“We always feel like the oppressed nation in rugby, like we’re hated more than anyone else – that’s probably due to the history of the Englishman roaming the world years ago,” he says.
“That means there’s huge pressure on the starting XV and the guys who come on, but if they were not good enough to play in pressure games then they wouldn’t be there, so I’m confident they won’t be overawed.”
Bracken was speaking to JOE at ‘Lads’ Night In’, a joint initiative from online poker site PokerStars and charity Prostate Cancer UK aimed at getting men across the UK to come together for poker games amongst friends and raise awareness of prostate cancer, which will affect one in eight men in the UK in their lifetime.
“Men can see getting ill as a weakness, whether from prostate cancer or another form of cancer, whereas we should treat it as something important that we’re all aware of, and keep getting checked. It’s a timely reminder to check yourself and make sure, especially at my age,” he explains.
“There’s a sense that blokes are macho and don’t like to talk about their illnesses, and playing poker is a good opportunity to have a chat and have a good craic.”
.@KyranBracken showing his #MenUnited colours at the @HippodromeLDN #LadsNightIn pic.twitter.com/SpSE4VegOm
— Prostate Cancer UK (@ProstateUK) September 25, 2015
