England must be brave enough to make mistakes, says George

BAGSHOT, England : Coach Steve Borthwick and captain Jamie George said on Thursday that England's players must not be afraid of making errors when they take on the mighty challenge of Ireland, but they would rather not make as many as they did two weeks ago.

After a bright start against Scotland, England went to pieces, throwing wild passes and dropping easy passes in a ragged display. In all they made 25 handling errors and were turned over an incredible 22 times en route to a 30-21 defeat.

Equally as worrying was that when replacement winger Immanuel Feyi-Waboso, who gets his first start on Saturday, darted through for a try with 14 minutes remaining, England failed miserably to mount any further meaningful attacks as Scotland cruised home.

"When we reflect on that Scotland game the most disappointing thing is how we deviated from what we wanted to do," George said on Thursday ahead of the Twickenham clash. "We’ve spoken quite openly about not being afraid of making errors, but obviously when you repeat those errors back to back that becomes a bit of an issue.

"Then I think probably off the back of that we went a bit individual at times, and probably tightened up a little bit. So for us the last couple of weeks in particular has been around making sure that we can be ourselves, making sure that it is still okay to make mistakes but that we’re going to learn very quickly from those. Because we are a team that wants to push things, we want to see where we can take things.

"The blueprint of how we wanted to play in those first 20 minutes against Scotland was outstanding, the way that we went out and acted on that gameplan was great. The disappointing thing was that we gifted them a lot, and that was largely down to people