sport news MIKE BROWN: Kevin Sinfield will be having some harsh words with his England ... trends now
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I watched Duhan van der Merwe’s try again a few times on my journey home from Twickenham on Saturday night. What an unbelievable score. He deserves all the praise that will go his way, but the defence was simply not good enough.
Kevin Sinfield will be having some harsh words with his new England players in the review meeting. The defence was way off throughout. There were a too many gaps and players going out of the system, compounded by poor tackle technique. That is an individual player’s responsibility.
Someone like Van der Merwe is not going to do anything but run at you. He had a field day. It is hard to get a defensive system embedded in 10 days when you have players coming in from all over the Premiership but with another week together that should get better.
The upside is that defence is easier to fix up than attack in the short. It comes down to mentality as much as technique. Knowing Steve Borthwick, I am sure he and Sinfield will be very disappointed with that and they will let the players know it is not acceptable in an England shirt. I am sure that will be fixed pretty quickly.
Taking the positives, the attack looked a lot better when they were playing on top of Scotland. They were
