The Nations Championship: England's new proving ground

Fiji in Liverpool

Rugby's calendar has a new centrepiece, and England are already knee-deep in it. The Nations Championship pits the Six Nations sides against the southern giants across summer and autumn, with everything pointing to a finals weekend at Twickenham in November. Here is how the new competition works, and how England's tournament has gone so far.

For years there was talk of tying the international game together into something that actually counted. The Nations Championship is the result: a new competition, played every other year, that finally gives those July and November Test windows a shape and a prize at the end of them.

How it works

Twelve teams, split into two pools of six. The Six Nations sides - England, France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland and Wales - make up one group; Argentina, Australia, Fiji, Japan, New Zealand and South Africa the other. Nobody plays a side from their own pool. Instead each team takes on all six from the opposite group once, three at home and three away, spread across the July and November internationals.

Points work as they do in most of the game: four for a win, two for a draw, a bonus for scoring four tries and another for losing by fewer than eight. Six rounds later, the standings in each pool set up the payoff - a finals weekend at Twickenham from 27 to 29 November, where every side meets its opposite number from the other group. Finish top and you play for the title on the Saturday; everyone else lines up in ranked play-offs for placing and pride.

England's summer

England's opener was a chastening one. South Africa were ruthless at Ellis Park, running out 45-21 winners and leaving Steve Borthwick's side with plenty to chew on in the thin Johannesburg air. It was a reminder, if one were needed, of the gap that still exists at the very top.

The response was emphatic. A week later England took Fiji apart, romping to a 73-8 win - and did so in Liverpool, of all places, the fixture staged at Everton's Hill Dickinson Stadium. That is one of the tournament's quirks: a designated 'away' game played on home soil, and a first sign that 'home' and 'away' do not always mean what you would expect.

Next comes Argentina in Santiago del Estero on 18 July, and a proper test of which of those two performances was the truer marker. Los Pumas at home, in the heat, are nobody's idea of a gentle afternoon.

All roads to Twickenham

The autumn is where it could get special. Australia on 8 November, Japan on the 14th and New Zealand on the 21st all come to Twickenham, three home games in a row to close out the pool stage. Do enough across those, and the finals weekend waits at the same ground seven days later. It is not hard to picture a November in which England play four times in London and end it playing for silverware.

Plenty has to go right first, and that Ellis Park scoreline says SB still has work to do. But that is rather the point of the new format. Every one of these Tests now carries weight in a table, and a summer tour and an autumn series that used to feel like separate errands are suddenly one long campaign. For England, it has already served up a low and a high. The rest is still to be written.