Owen Farrell says the England players and staff are hurting after a comprehensive defeat to France in the Six Nations on Saturday. The Red Rose fell to a record 53-10 defeat to Les Bleus.
With the England Captain relegated to the bench for this clash, he nevertheless took time to speak to the media.
Planet Rugby’s James While listened to Farrell’s disappointment and obvious frustration at an absolute pumping by an amazing French side.
“We’ve got to improve”
“We’ve not gone into too much detail, to be honest, at the minute. Obviously, the result and the scoreline is hugely disappointing for us,” Farrell explained.
“It is never nice. Most of the people in that dressing room have been through it at some stage. Not normally with England, definitely not normally with England. I guess the thing for us is nothing really changes. We’ve got to improve, and this will make us have a good look at ourselves.”
“I don’t think you ever expect to lose like that at home; you simply don’t expect to lose like that anywhere as an England team. France got ahead to a pretty good lead, and we found ourselves chasing the game. We all know when you are chasing the game against a good team, you can get stung, and we did.”
“It is a tough one to reflect on right at this moment, and it was just hard in the dressing room afterwards. There was nothing there was nothing too specific at that moment, just reminding the lads that when we’re under pressure, even when we’re not under pressure, everything that we want to do, we want to do it together, and we want to draw on the power of team and make sure that we’re improving and make sure that we’re fighting for everything. That was pretty much the gist of the message.”.
Improvements
“I don’t think I’d question peoples’ intention, we’re just looking at how we can do it better. At this moment in time, we’ll obviously analyse our own game first. We’ve got a chance to watch them tomorrow, but I imagine a pretty big chunk of it will be focusing on us and seeing what we can improve and how we can do it together. I imagine after today; everybody is champing at the bit to get going again.”
“As has been said, we’re obviously building here, and they got out to a pretty big lead, and we were trying to find a way back into the game.
“When you’re doing that against a big powerful side who can sting you when you try things, or the ball comes loose, especially in the wet, they come alive, and they certainly did that today. A lot of credit has got to go to France and the way they played, but we know we can be a lot better than that.
“We’ll learn a lot about ourselves, and we’ll go away from this, thoroughly the game and the instances. For many players, it’ll be a great learning experience from us. But I say that in the sense that we didn’t want this- we have to make sure we maximise what we can from it.
“I’ll make this clear; we fell a long, long way short of where we want to be. The way we were in the contact area wasn’t good enough on both sides of the ball. That is a huge lesson as you look at the top teams in the world, and they are powerful, and France showed their class and character.
France’s power
“Ultimately, you look at their team, and you know they’re a team packed full of power, and whilst we had the plan to try and mitigate against the power and try and take some of that away and play a different way against them, we weren’t able to execute that plan.”
“Part of that was the number of mistakes we made, which was high, but it was also against a team that didn’t allow us to execute the plan as they were very, very good. Again, we are hurting from today; the players are hurting, I’m hurting, the coaches are hurting, we’re hurting from it. We have to make sure we become better for this.”
After the defeat, England is now ranked fourth in the Six Nations. They will face Ireland at the Aviva Stadium in the final round of the Championship on March 18.
READ MORE: 21 humiliating stats and facts following England’s record loss to France
The article Owen Farrell: England captain dissects the record Six Nations defeat to France appeared first on Planetrugby.com.
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