2016 or 2025? Pick your combined England starting XV

Saturday’s 33-19 victory against New Zealand extended England’s run of consecutive wins to 10 – their best sequence for almost a decade.

England won 18 matches in a row between October 2015 and March 2017, 17 of them under Eddie Jones, to equal the All Blacks’ record for the most successive victories by a tier-one nation.

England won the 2016 Six Nations Grand Slam as part of that run and a healthy contingent of players from that era were part of the squad that reached the 2019 Rugby World Cup final in Japan.

Some of those, including captain Maro Itoje and fly-half George Ford, remain an integral part of the team under Steve Borthwick.

How many of the current side would make it into the 2016 line-up?

England’s record winning run began at the end of the 2015 Rugby World Cup when, having already been eliminated, they scored 60 points against Uruguay in their final pool match in Manchester.

Jones replaced Stuart Lancaster as England coach after the tournament and kept a settled group together for much of his early reign.

The 10th victory of England’s winning sequence was a 44-40 success against Australia in Sydney which wrapped up a 3-0 series clean sweep against the Wallabies.

Eleven of the 15 players who started that match had also been in the line-up for Jones’ first game in charge – a 15-9 victory against Scotland at Murrayfield in the Six Nations.

Danny Care and Joe Launchbury were on the bench in Sydney, prop Joe Marler had opted out of selection for the Australia tour and back row James Haskell was injured after impressing in the first two Tests of the series.

Starting XV v Australia (25 June, 2016): Mike Brown; Anthony Watson, Jonathan Joseph, Owen Farrell, Jack Nowell; George Ford, Ben Youngs; Mako Vunipola, Dylan Hartley (captain), Dan Cole, Maro Itoje, George Kruis, Chris Robshaw, Teimana Harrison, Billy Vunipola.

Borthwick was without many of his top stars for the summer tour of Argentina and the United States as it coincided with the British and Irish Lions’ trip to Australia.

A relatively inexperienced squad won all three matches on that tour to continue the momentum of England’s fine end to the Six Nations, which had begun with a 27-22 defeat by Ireland in Dublin.

That remains their only loss of 2025, with a home Test against Argentina on Sunday rounding off England’s schedule for the calendar year.

Those displays in the summer only increased the competition for places, as was demonstrated by those who were not involved against the All Blacks.

Fin Smith, England’s first-choice fly-half for much of the Six Nations, did not feature in the matchday 23 on Saturday, while Lions trio Tommy Freeman, Ollie Chessum and Elliot Daly are among a group of players with legitimate claims to have been involved but for their respective injuries.

Starting XV v New Zealand (15 November, 2025): Freddie Steward; Tom Roebuck, Ollie Lawrence, Fraser Dingwall, Immanuel Feyi-Waboso; George Ford, Alex Mitchell; Fin Baxter, Jamie George, Joe Heyes, Maro Itoje (captain), Alex Coles, Guy Pepper, Sam Underhill, Ben Earl.