Not many of Eddie Jones’s statements stand the test of time, which is little surprise given his penchant for making up anecdotes and statistics, but every so often the former England head coach was remarkably prescient.

Cast your mind back four years, if you dare, to the 2020 Autumn Nations Cup, which I would volunteer as the worst rugby tournament that I have covered. Against an already depressing backdrop of near empty stadiums because of the Covid pandemic, the rugby was somehow even more depressing. Defence was everything, attack was a dirty word. England players spoke openly about avoiding line breaks. George Ford referred to possession of the ball as a “ticking time bomb”.

Jones, however, was unfazed by the chorus of criticism over the quality of rugby in the tournament. “We go through cycles,” Jones said. “The game is cyclical. We go through attack and defence cycles. And that’s the beauty of our game – it doesn’t sit still. We go through these periods in the game. The next cycle is always an attacking one so let’s enjoy the defensive cycle we have at the moment and look forward to the attacking cycle when it comes.”

That cycle seemed to culminate in South Africa’s victory in last year’s World Cup in which defences and kicking dominated. That included England. Springboks assistant coach Felix Jones, since hired as England’s defence coach, provided a pithy summation of Steve Borthwick’s team during the Chasing the Sun documentary: “If I could sum up their soul in two words, it’s statistics – or ‘Moneyball’ – and kicking game. That’s it.”

Since then it feels like a new dawn has risen with England among the teams who have emerged blinking into this strange new light of attacking rugby, finishing their Six Nations campaign with seven tries against Ireland and France. As my colleague Charles Richardson noted not altogether approvingly last week, there has also been an explosion of tries in the Premiership this season.

Yet now we are at the business end of the season, we are entering a possible pivot point that could well determine England’s direction of travel for this next cycle.