Nick Cain: No wonder stone-face Steve Hansen has a smile at last

Here's Stuart Lancaster's nightmare scenario. The week before England are due to play the first Test of their three Test June series against New Zealand in Auckland, the English Premiership season culminates in a Northampton versus Harlequins final.
In one fell swoop the England head coach is deprived of the spine of his team – the players on whom the muscle and sinew of his game plan, and the mindset that makes it work, is built.  It is a prospect that must have the All Blacks coach, Steve Hansen,  whose demeanour is not exactly that of one of the “happy smiling people” of the REM song, rubbing his hands in gleeful  anticipation of a ‘gimme' to start the series.
Out goes the impressive lineout built on the club understanding between his Northampton forward trio of Dylan Hartley, Courtney Lawes and Tom Wood. It would also disrupt the promising centre partnership that Luther Burrell – who scored against France and Scotland – has forged with Billy Twelvetrees. The unavailable Saints gang is completed by Lee Dickson, leaving England thin of scrum-half cover.
If taking that Northampton quartet out of his starting line-up wasn't bad enough, Lancaster then has to consider the loss of the Harlequins contingent. This is also four strong and includes Chris Robshaw, the captain he has invested so much faith in, scrum-half Danny Care, who has at last found his scintillating club form for England, the increasingly authoritative loose head, Joe Marler, and England's outstanding player, full-back Mike Brown.
Deprive England of the axis running through Marler and Hartley in the front row, to Lawes at lock, to Robshaw and Wood in the back row, to Care at scrum-half, Burrell at centre, and Brown as the counter-attacking star turn, and England will be unrecognisable from their Six Nations shape.
Not only will they be unrecognisable, they will be severely weakened – and that, definitively, is not the way any team wants to start an away series against the world champions.
How has this happened?
Lancaster has been thrown a hospital pass, inheriting an IRB tour schedule which the RFU suits should have challenged as soon as it dawned on them that there was a clash with the Premiership final. It is also fair to ask why Rob Andrew, the RFU's professional rugby director, has not managed to get a potential mismatch, in which England are at a serious disadvantage, changed to a Saxons match against either the New Zealand Maori or New Zealand ‘A'.
The player welfare protocols that Andrew has been involved in drawing up should also be examined. These dictate that Lancaster cannot fly the Premiership final players down to New Zealand immediately (i.e. Sunday/Monday after the final) and play them the following weekend.  Exactly why it is prohibited is hard to fathom when you compare it with the tortuous route the 2013 Lions squad took to get to Australia last summer, with the journey starting only two days after a Premiership final which featured six members of the Lions squad (Leicester's Youngs brothers, Tom and Ben, Dan Cole, Manu Tuilagi, Tom Croft and Geoff Parling).
This included a five-day stopover in Hong Kong, featuring a match against the Barbarians in sweltering temperatures which topped 30 degrees, before making landfall in Perth.
After two nights in Perth the Lions played their opening (midweek) fixture in Australia against the Western Force. Cole, Tuilagi and Croft all started against the Force while Croft and both Youngs were on the bench.
Although none of the Leicester Lions played until the Force game, the Lions clearly pushed the boundaries on rest protocols. If the Lions can achieve that sort of flex, surely, if this is a one-off, the protocols could be relaxed so that England can field their strongest team in a crucial tour opener against the All Blacks.
Having inherited this tour cock-up, Lancaster has done his best to put a positive spin on it. A couple of weeks ago he said: “The more I've thought about it, the more I'm quite enthused by the opportunity to give others a chance. We had a training session the other day where it was 15 on 15, and I looked at the team that were starting against Scotland, and I looked at the second team that were training against them, and it was a pretty good team.”
He added, “So, for the first Test in New Zealand, it's not a bad thing that someone else is going to have to start for England in order to evolve our depth.”
The England head coach struck a similar chord this week – but, for the first time, he also conceded he had reservations about the itinerary the team faces. “It is not ideal,” he agreed.
Lancaster elaborated: “It is an inherited situation I can't control so I have to find a way to look at the positives.
“I have had 30-odd lads training for the last five or six weeks and I genuinely would take it as a positive if Owen Farrell made it to the (Premiership final) and George Ford started against New Zealand in the first Test. I would see it as a great opportunity for George.”
I'm sure Ford is a good trooper, but potentially starting your first game at fly-half in a severely weakened England outfit against a full strength All Black side has the look of a hospital pass – with the bandages already attached.