Favourable 2027 Rugby World Cup draw provides few potholes for England | Robert Kitson

As the Ashes have reminded us, it never pays to get too excited in advance about winning in Australia. But once the draw for the 2027 men’s Rugby World Cup had concluded and the various knockout permutations had been crunched there was a strong whiff of deja vu in the Sydney air. A World Cup down under and a decent draw for England? What could possibly go wrong?

The organisers had already stoked the narrative nicely by wheeling out Jonny Wilkinson in the promotional tournament video, essentially a mashup of Mad Max and Wacky Races roaring across a dusty outback. When every Australian wakes up on Thursday to discover it is 666 days until the 2027 edition kicks off, the nagging fear of nightmarish history repeating itself will further intensify.

The cards have certainly fallen more kindly for England than for several of their rivals. While they are lurking in one of the shallower of the six pools – Wales, Tonga and Zimbabwe – the opening fixture of the tournament, in Perth on 1 October, may well thrust together the Wallabies and the All Blacks from minute one. The reward for the winners? A possible place in the same side of the knockout draw as the defending champions, South Africa, and France.

It could well mean that once again only one of the Springboks, the All Blacks and Les Bleus will feature in the final, assuming all of them top their pools. Even the pack leaders South Africa will not be entirely relaxed about having to beat New Zealand and France on successive weekends simply to reach the final in Sydney on 13 November.

There will be little in the way of gentle foreplay either for Ireland and Scotland, who collided in the pool stages in France in 2023. Should they finish second Scotland can expect to bump into France in the last 16 – with 24 countries now involved, the format has had a makeover – while Ireland could easily end up meeting their old nemesis Argentina in the last eight.

That is not to say England’s route to the final is totally devoid of potholes, but their opponents will mostly be familiar ones. Hopefully, Welsh rugby will have rebounded from its lowly position by then, but even the proprietor of Cardiff’s biggest inflatable leek shop would not put much money on a repeat of Wales’s pool win over England at Twickenham in 2015.

Tonga and Zimbabwe, ranked 18th and 24th in the world respectively, are also less threatening than, say, Georgia and a revitalised Samoa might have been and a potential last-16 clash with Italy, who have never beaten England, is the perfect sort of mind-concentrating knockout game the red rose management would like at that stage of the tournament.

And then? If the Wallabies cannot beat New Zealand it opens up the very real spectre of them being dumped out of their own tournament – again – by the bloody Poms. Then again, if anything is going to galvanise this Australia side that surely will. Two years is also a long time and it could yet be that another NRL recruit or two will materialise to bolster the host nation’s prospects.

Whoever emerges, however, would not mind a semi-final against an ageing Ireland or the Pumas, particularly if the Boks have already been sensationally ejected from the running. While Argentina continue to improve and Ireland will never be less than awkward, it definitely feels more possible than it did at the start of the week that England could go all the way.

A bold conclusion, maybe. But if they can build on their run of 11 Test victories, they should certainly arrive with more squad depth than at any stage since 2003. With several fast-maturing youngsters and a talismanic captain, there is obvious scope for further improvement over the next couple of seasons.

The Rugby Football Union could even do worse than recruit Sir Clive Woodward as a part-time strategic consultant, if only to wind up the Aussies even more than Henry Pollock is poised to do. Woodward’s side, crucially, were accustomed to winning and the old TCUP mindset – Thinking Correctly Under Pressure – made a massive difference when they were under the pump against Wales in the quarters and locked in an extra-time arm wrestle in the final. “Watching this was the worst experience of my life,” said the Wallaby lock Justin Harrison, wearily, as footage of Wilkinson’s 2003 coup de grace was replayed yet again after the draw.

So all aboard for the 2027 sequel: ‘Beware The Great White – They’re Back!’ The blessed Jonny will not be available to put the boot in again this time, but his compatriots have a fresh glint in their eyes. When the first batch of tickets go on sale in February, expect plenty of applications from English postcodes.