10 March 2008

REST assured there will be some straight-talking meetings this week and tough calls made about what needs to be done to move England forward.

No-one will throw their toys out of the pram, there’ll be no heated meetings and it certainly won’t be a crisis meeting.

It’ll be what we do after every match, a measured and constructive breakdown of the game. 

Saturday’s performance was unacceptable but hopefully it’s just a blip. Brian and the coaches are doing a good job but it’s going to take time for what they want and how we want to play.

This was the first game where we haven’t played well in either half and it was a poor performance all round. I know we have lost two games in this tournament but we played really well against Wales in the first half even though we capitulated in the second.

What we don’t want to do is turn into a hit and miss side where we are not consistent from one match, or even from one half, to the next. We want to be a team that plays well constantly.   

We didn’t play well in all facets of Saturday’s game – all the things that we had talked about doing in the week came to a grinding halt. 

It was a horrible day but we can’t use the weather as an excuse. Scotland dealt with those conditions far better than we did. You have to take your hat off to them and say they deserved to win. They got that early lead and then played the right football to stop us getting back into the game. They thought ‘right, it’s windy and wet let’s play down in their half’ and forced us into mistakes and through our indiscipline we put pressure on ourselves.

There’s no doubt that our indiscipline cost us. As a player you make instantaneous decisions about when a ball is out of a ruck situation and available up for grabs. In some games those decisions go for you, in others they don’t, and that’s pretty much what happened yesterday.

There were definitely key instances in the game when we gave away penalties and were marched down the pitch. It makes it very hard in those conditions to relieve pressure when you have been put back in your own 22.

We defended well in the sense that we didn’t concede any tries but we couldn’t threaten Scotland because most of the time our option was to kick the ball.

When it’s windy and rainy and adverse conditions for handling it’s easier to defend because you can increase your line speed and put a huge amount of pressure on attackers. It’s easier to play without the ball.

When Scotland went nine points clear they really didn’t need to play much handling rugby. They just had to kick the ball back to us and let us try and chase the game.