Jones has ‘no regrets’ after England’s Six Nations failure as Launchbury returns

Eddie Jones says he has “no regrets” about any of his tactical decisions last Saturday and insists that England dominated the Calcutta Cup game in Edinburgh despite Scotland’s 20-17 victory. The head coach is now urging his players to “stay tough” before their Six Nations match in Rome on Sunday and has recalled the fit-again Wasps forward Joe Launchbury and London Irish’s uncapped flanker Tom Pearson to his training squad.

There has been no shortage of criticism of England’s collective handling of the final quarter at Murrayfield following the substitution of the fly-half Marcus Smith with the visitors 17-10 ahead. Jones, though, says his side’s poor attacking execution was the primary problem and that George Ford was sent on because “I felt at that stage we needed to change things”.

With Courtney Lawes still recovering from concussion, Manu Tuilagi regaining full match fitness and Lewis Ludlam out with damaged ribs, Jones is hoping Launchbury’s experience will help his squad “draw a line in the sand” and “light up Rome” this weekend. The management’s view, which will raise a few Scottish eyebrows, is that England would have won on Saturday 95 times out of 100 with slight improvements in certain areas.

“We know the result wasn’t the way we wanted but, if you look at any objective data, we dominated the game,” said Jones, whose side finished fifth last season. “If you had a betting company and they got all the information from the game, we’d win probably 85 times out of 100. Now if we’d done a number of things a little bit better, we win the game 95 times. That means our performance was pretty good but that doesn’t mean you always win the game.

“I’ve had this many times in my career, where you’ve played really well,