England v Japan - Autumn International
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England are masters at getting away with being in the way of the opposition at the breakdown, "accidentally" ending up there in the tackle and/or rolling the wrong way. I wish refs would penalise it when the halfback is marginalised by having to take an extra step or two backwards or work his way around a player, rather than just ignoring it because the halfback got it out.
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Fell asleep in the second half, woke up to see the same back row on the pitch. Learned nothing from that game, still can’t defend, still not dynamic enough at the breakdown.. awful autumn all told, worse than I thought we might be with fundamental flaws in our game. Change the coach…
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This was a game where we had the opportunity to firstly try out some newer guys and secondly look to hone our attack. Farrell did both yesterday with Ireland and learned a lot. But what did we actually learn that we didn’t already know? JVP is not up to it at this level. We knew that. Randall is a menace if given time and licence by the coach. Well we knew that too.
Take away our four tries from a driving line out against a modest team and where were we?
We needed an emphatic win and we got that but sheesh, what a waste.