Six Nations 2026: What went wrong for England in defeat by Ireland?

21-year-old back-rower Henry Pollock has finally earned his first Test start after seven dynamic matches off the bench.

The idea was that his energy would help avoid a repeat of last week’s situation when Scotland attacked England in the first 20 minutes.

Propeller forward Ellis Genge told BBC Sport: “What do you do? Two weeks in a row you give up a lot of points in the first 15 minutes.”

“Everyone needs to take care of themselves. No one knows the answer right now, otherwise we would figure it out.

“It opened up the scar tissue from last week and we need to manage this period better and stop turning the ball over.

“It’s a brutal, professional sport because if you make a 5% mistake you lose. We probably bought too much into the excitement of the first week. We can’t let the noise in anymore.”

“We let everyone down. We’re sorry for that, but I promise we’ll make it better. We’ll go and work as hard as we can to make it right.”

England found themselves 22nd behind Ireland on several occasions but lacked any clinical superiority and committed 14 handling errors in the game.

George Ford also missed touch with a penalty that could have put the home team in position to score.

“As players, senior players and the leadership team, we must take responsibility for not starting the game correctly,” Itoje said.

“It was just our fault. We turned the ball over too much and were not accurate when we got into positions that could hurt Ireland and then we gave ourselves a mountain to climb.”