If Steve Borthwick believes what he says, I am very worried about England.

Steve Borthwick suggested that the reason England lost to Wales was because his team didn't use their chances. Dan Mullan

A feature of the modern post-match interview is that almost nothing remarkable comes from the respondents, especially since they are now fully trained in working with the media. You can almost predetermine the entire contribution of the interviewee, depending on whether he won or lost.

“Very pleased with the victory; proud of the team; there is still work to be done; one game at a time…” Alternately: “Obviously disappointed with defeat; proud of the efforts shown by the team; lessons to be learned; there is a lot of work to be done; we need to move on and leave this behind.”

That's the way it is, though you may see a glimmer of sincerity in a careless, spontaneous moment. With that in mind, hopefully England boss Steve Borthwick was just playing the media game in his interview after losing in Cardiff last Saturday.

If so, I don't think so. criticize him — why should he break the conventions, especially when interviewers seem unable or unwilling to ask tough questions and insist on candid answers? If this is not the case, and his review of England's performance was the sum of his true thoughts, then English fans may well be worried. The sum total of Borthwick's remarks, which he returned to several times, was that England simply failed to seize their chance.

There is only one problem with Borthwick's claim: what are the odds? Okay, to be technically correct, and without getting into a semantic debate, in the first half there was a clean break by Joe Marchand and there were two corridors close to the Welsh line. However, when the break wasn't backed by a flood of supporting players, and when you can't tell what you would have scored if it wasn't for a mistake in the final pass, it's not really a scoring chance. Likewise, your own line-outs where you don't receive the ball and either turn it over or take a penalty kick also don't count. Using the football equivalent, it's like saying that a free kick outside the box was a chance to score even if you didn't even go past the defensive wall, or you had a corner but didn't score first. quarterback.

The breaks from Joe Marchand (right) brought a rare glimmer of positivity to a dull England performance. Photo: Getty Images/Ian Cook

Trying moments were a feature of the game, it's just that Wales had five of them. They scored out of two and had two more that weren't taken by close margins and television replays were needed for the decision to be made. That was one problem. Another was the fact that when Marcus Smith was given front football and England began to put more difficult problems on the Welsh defense, they didn't generate much attention. To continue the theme of England's problems, we can add the fact that whenever England started to get a marginal advantage and started to apply any kind of sustained pressure, they turned the ball, either lost lineouts on their own shot, or simply knocked down. ball on. The last of these factors should sober up England. You won't win international games, even against teams with many changes, if you reduce the number of processing errors from 17 to 2.

Well, what about the pros? Why are you so negative? Okay, Joe Marchand and Lewis Ludlum had good first halves and, well, that's about it if you're honest and don't want to live in iconic country. It may have been the first outing in two months for a team that needs time to get back together. We could and should see a much improved England performance at Twickenham next Saturday. However, the same can be said about Wales, in the starting XV of which there were many players with less experience than their English counterparts.

If criticism should be, and it should have been, then counterbalancing it with constructive comments is now mandatory. In this spirit, it can be said that the English ball game needs more sophistication. Snippets of the game where Ellis Genge, Alex Dombrandt and Joe Kokanasiga challenged the Welsh defense with more difficult challenges showed what England can do if they win the clash and work harder to get the players in the right positions for the transfer.

It could be argued that the Harlequins' connection to Danny Kare, Marcus Smith, Alex Dombrandt and Joe Marchand looked sporadically convincing, but this will not feature in Borthwick's plans for the launch XV and will most likely only appear in the secondary RVC Games. This brings us to the underlying issue: unless England improves markedly, to the point where they can win their first pool game against Argentina, the games against Japan and Samoa will become knockout games where England cannot afford the luxury of resting players.