England's famous brand of 'hard-men' have given way to gym-conditioned athletes Baxter is also convinced that the new breed of hard men are not found in the traditional positions of lock, tight head prop and blindside flanker. He insists that rugby's new gladiators are centres. The midfield backs are the real warriors because they go flat out at each other as well as sucking up the big forwards running at them off short line-outs. Mike Tindall is still fantastically good in this area. That was his value to England over the years. He had an ability to make tackles, get up and over the ball and stay in the contact area as opposition players tried to blast him away. It is important to acknowledge Baxter's and West's observations, to concede that the game these days consists of a series of car crashes and that the current generation are more physical, more athletic, bigger, leaner and better conditioned than those who have gone before. It is crucial, too, to understand that tactical substitutions, the policy of swapping No 8s and flankers at different scrums, and the use of different back-line receivers in attack and defence have deprived rugby of the resonance of man-on-man confrontations over 80 minutes which defined the reputations of the game's great hard men. But, that said, which of the current England forwards will have Scots" knees knocking as they prepare for the Calcutta Cup match in a touch under three weeks? Because genuine toughness is not about cheap shots and gratuitous violence. It's about sustained quality of performance, about raging with an intensity which rarely collapses into indiscipline, about the opposition knowing with chilling certainty that they are in for some of the toughest minutes of their Test season. "Maybe it is an area that England are lacking," Baxter acknowledges. But there isn't another Johnsonesque figure outside the squad. We don't create those animals now. The concentration is on improving skill sets, on becoming more athletic. John Kingston, who grooms the Harlequins forwards, thinks it might be an error even to search for an individual like, say, South Africa's Bakkies Botha or New Zealand's Brad Thorn, men with the ability to galvanise team-mates and raise the temperature of the contest by the energy and malevolence which they bring to their work. "That's what might have happened with England under Johnson," Kingston argues. There was an element of Johnson wanting to select a side and a style in his own image. The problem comes when you don't have players of his character and quality. Attempts to act like an enforcer can come unstuck and end up simply as indiscipline. There are forwards in the current England squad who we seek to exploit when we come up against them in matches because they lack the maturity and judgment which the role of hard man requires. Some of it comes with experience. At the moment the squad is in transition. In years to come some of the players may grow into those roles but it requires a brain. You can have lunatics but lunatics get found out. There may be a cultural link to all this as well. Nigel Redman, who has worked with England age group teams for many years, is adamant that the modern generation simply have it too easy. They jump from school straight into a professional career. They haven't experienced trying to balance work and sport, coming to training after a day on a building site. ""I've seen a physio pull a player out of a training session without consulting the coach because his heart rate had hit its maximum level. That's when a coach needs to ask the player whether he thinks he could continue, even though he wouldn't allow him to do so because that's how you discover how resilient that individual is. It's about encouraging players to discover their own limits. ""I've lost count of the number of times coaches have complained to me that players aren't decision makers while showing me their 84-page play book. Agents are a factor in this too. There isn't enough personal responsibility. There's no doubt that it's a different world. "I played my club rugby before the advent of the gym culture and certain players had what I call natural man-strength," Baxter says. I came up against Dean Richards once. Getting hold of him was like wrestling a bear. That disparity has been eroded because of the conditioning programmes everyone is on. But there was more to Richards than brute force. Like Johnson, he had a conviction about him, a certainty that he knew precisely what it took to influence big Test matches combined with the desire and capacity to bring it all to fruition. The delivery was what made them hard men. The great English forwards over the years enacted the cliché. When the going got tough, they got going. Ask yourself this. Which current England forward will carry that tradition into Murrayfield?