After seven dynamic caps off the bench, 21-year-old back rower Henry Pollock finally gained a first Test start.<\/p>\n
The idea was his energy would help avoid a repeat of last week when Scotland blitzed England in the opening 20 minutes.<\/p>\n
“What do you do? Two weeks in a row conceding so many points in the first 15 minutes,” prop forward Ellis Genge told BBC Sport.<\/p>\n
“Everyone has to take a look at themselves. No-one knows what the answer is right now or we would have sorted it out.<\/p>\n
“It opened up scar tissue from last week – we have to be better at managing that period and stop turning the ball over.<\/p>\n
“It’s brutal, professional sport because if you get 5% wrong it’s gone. We probably believed the hype from the first week too much. We can’t let the noise in now.<\/p>\n
“We have let everyone down. Apologies for that but I promise we will make it better. We are going to go away and work as hard as we can to go away and rectify things.”<\/p>\n
England found themselves deep in Ireland’s 22 on multiple occasions but lacked any clinical edge, making 14 handling errors in the game.<\/p>\n
George Ford also missed touch with a penalty that could have put the hosts in a scoring position.<\/p>\n
“As players, senior players and the leadership team we have to take responsibility for not starting the game right,” said Itoje.<\/p>\n
“It was just our inaccuracy. We turned the ball over too much, and when we did get into positions to hurt Ireland we were not accurate and then gave ourselves a mountain to climb.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After seven dynamic caps off the bench, 21-year-old back rower Henry Pollock finally gained a first Test start.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":438799,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-441018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=441018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441018\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/438799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}