Rhys Preistland,
James Hook,
Jamie Roberts
J Davies,
S Williams,
A Beck

England kicked away the most ball of any team in the 6N this week – 41% in fact
England made the most errors of any 6N team this weekend – 14
Wales made the least errors of any 6N team this weekend – 9

And the England lack of line breaking is hardly a blip. their 1 against Wales is part of a wider problem, they only made 1 line break against both the other teams they have played so far too.

And didn’t you feel just a little bit lucky at the end of the match? I mean, think back to the moment when the TMO ruled that the footage of Strettle grounding the ball was inconclusive. Didn’t you feel a pretty enormous surge of relief? Didn’t you wonder (even for a moment) whether Walsh was going to go back to the advantage? And wasn’t your first reaction to the final whistle a sense of, ‘phew, we got away with that one’? If not, you’re a calmer man than I.

Listen, I’d be the first to slam any article that made out that England were clearly the better team, that Wales robbed them, and that the whole result came down to the bounce of a ball and a blind TMO. I’ve said elsewhere, and I’ll say it again, that I thought England were only on top for one of the match’s four quarters (and, I’d argue, Wales had two of them). Wales played better when it mattered. England were never in control. Right up to the moment Scott Williams ripped the ball from Courtney Lawes, I fully expected Wales to find a way to win. The stats back all this up: as RugbyNick has shown, they hardly show that Wales were dominant. Largely, they suggest a very evenly contested game. But an evenly contested game that Wales shaded. Just. And, of course, there are a whole bunch of ways in which key moments might have gone for us that didn’t.

Nevertheless, we were a bit lucky. We nearly didn’t get away with failing to gather the final restart. We nearly didn’t get away with Priestland’s persistent failure to pin England back in their 22. We nearly didn’t get away with the lost lineouts, the chargedown or England’s last-gasp effort to snatch the draw. The best team won. But just like the match against Ireland, my immediate feeling on the final whistle was, ‘Well, we got away with that one.’

Just because English papers can’t see past a better-than-expected showing from their boys, we shouldn’t pretend that it couldn’t very easily have gone the other way.

The right time to move on, with our good wishes and thanks

Good trip?