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Well, I guess I would be guilty of a truism if I stated it was a better performance than last week. But I do like looking for the positive. I'm afraid that don;t agree that our decision making was noticibly better though, and remains our biggest problem. No doubt that last decision by Robshaw will be used as a stick to beat him, and is was undoubtedly the wrong decision, but concentration on the matter will mask the real problems again.

Had Robshaw made the right decision I'm still certain that not one person connected with England rugby, from the supporters, through the team management, right down the the players, had even the first idea how England were going to construct a try. We never looked like scoring, and never tried anything different. Actually I am immediately going to diasagree with myself, we did try something differnt, our usual plan of attack consists of "give it to Manu", well we must have been using him as a decoy this week, didn't manage to pass to him till the 48th minute.

We fronted up well in the forwards, Launchbury and Parling particularly. We scrummaged solidly, though for a change seemd to be on the right side of refereeing decisions in that area. Whilst I'm on the ref, if I might be allowed to digress, I though the had a decent game, particulalrly for a man who can't see that a ball has cleared the crossbar by a good foot when he is 6 feet away. But one area puzzled me, he penalised du Plessis in the first scrum for binding on the arm, described as a marginal decision. In just about every scrum after du Plessis took exactly the same bind and no action was taken. Right, back to England. The forwards acarried much better than previous two weeks, didn't cough up anything like as much posession, but still perisisted in handling errors at the crucial moment. We still don't have a cutting edge in the backs, we rely on an individual doing something all the time, we almost fluked it again when Tuilagi intercepted, but then failed to draw the last defender and put our winger into the open expanses in front of him. Apparenly Mike Brown should have come inside i.e. closer to the defenders, to make it easier for Ashton to pass to him, I assume that is because an intenational bcak can't be expected to be able to pass accurately over 5 metres, nor to pass at the right time.

Had we not lost last week, then I suppose this would have been viewed as a decent performance, and in some ways it was, but we have lost the forward momentum we had over 6N and summer, which were by no means perfect performances, but coming from the satte we were in at RWC we were steadily improving, I feel that improvement has stalled, even gone backwards in the backs, previously we were at least trying to create something, but were lacking in execution, now we seem to be trying much less, and still often lacking in the execution.

Unhappiness, where's when I was young
And we didn't give a damn
'Cause we were raised
To see life as a fun and take it if we can