Zero tolerance will fail Henry warns

New Zealand’s World Cup winning coach Graham Henry believes England’s attempts to enforce a hardline disciplinarian approach will be doomed to failure ahead of the Six Nations.

England coach Stuart Lancaster has axed scrum-half Danny Care and full-back Delon Armitage for off-the-field incidents as the Six Nations champions attempt to rebuild after an ill-disciplined World Cup campaign.

However, Henry believes Lancaster’s zero tolerance stance could backfire if the rest of the England squad believed that Care and Armitage had been jettisoned from the set-up too quickly.

“Was it the right thing to drop both Care and Armitage altogether from their respective squads?

“Well, I don’t know all the details and I don’t know the full extent of their previous, but we might not have handled it in quite the same way during my time with the All Blacks and we did have the occasional problem child.”

Care was axed from the England squad after his arrest on drink-driving charges on New Year’s Eve.

It was the second drink-related incident involving the Harlequins scrum-half in the space of a few weeks following an altercation at a bar earlier in December.

However, Henry believes the All Blacks would have handled a similar case differently had he been in charge.

“Our strategy would have been to assemble Team Care. Call it a duty of ‘Care’ if you like. We would have given him all the support that we could make available,” he said.

“The approach would have been the same with Armitage.”