Jones targets France and takes 'enormous pride' from Irish loss

Very few nations do moral victories as well as Ireland but it seems like it's England’s turn to claim the most unwanted of sporting successes.

The immediate post-match reactions from both camps might have given someone who didn’t know the final score the impression that the hosts had won.

In fact, they were outscored four tries to nil, suffered a record loss in Twickenham to their opponents and crashed out of Guinness Six Nations contention.

That they were level with 20 minutes to play, having soldiered with 14 players from the second minute and dominated the set-piece, was the source of their claim to that empty victory Irish teams used to own.

So far down the road are Ireland, however, that Jamie Heaslip deemed the performance "crap" and many others urged that no-one take the scoreline at face value.

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"We have enormous pride from the team’s performance," England head coach Eddie Jones said.

"If you take out the first 10 minutes and the last 10 minutes, we probably shaded Ireland and played with a lot of tactical discipline, a lot of determination, and a lot of togetherness.

"We have a growing knowledge that this team has got great spirit. We’ve got a nice mix of experienced players and younger players coming through.

"We’ll learn a lot from that game, particularly in closing it down when we had the opportunity to.

"It was a great learning curve for the players and shows that the young players coming through are going to be very good players in the future. I think the 82,000