great game, rubbish result as an England fan

Erm.........

....Ok so maybe not the GS but a narrow defeat means they can still win the 6 nations. I could still be half right.

At the moment I am not confident we can beat Scotland or Italy away, so methinks we won't win the title either

Just watched this on records. Owens best ref in the world - to Brown and Huget "You are being immature".
Shame he did got give a crocked feed for the scrum that led to the penalty, but England should have defended that. Surprised he took Care off. Brown superb as ever.
England need more composure in the 22 and need to play what is in front of them, rather than reverting to type or kicking unproductively.

Same as the NZ game, they switched off in the last 20 minutes
Can't do it at this level...

Did the inexperience tell at the end and I thought the back line just badly misjudged the bounce twice for the 1st half tries.

Find England laughable previous posts about a grand slam!! Only one team this year !, wales going for 3rd championship in a row

Well we almost got it, and considering the first half it would have been robbery if we did. Gutting to see the French re-find their form for this game.

Women's six nations is looking like a real competition this year. I was stunned at the way the French forwards dominated England. With Ireland firmly in the mix again after their 59-0 wipe out of Scotland I'd love to see the Ireland v France game which I suspect will form the decider

Almost got it ?. It's called u lost !! Love how wales won being totally ignored

Will Wales win in Dublin though

First one ricocheted off one of our centre's legs in the first place so that was just bad luck, second one Goode went too high in the initial tackle (schoolboy error) so the defence was always in trouble after that. At the end England failed to hold France in their own half, my beef is that they don't seem to LEARN from repeated failures to close out a match. Looks like May won't be playing next week (broken nose?), hopefully this doesn't mean the return of Ashton

Be humble until you actually achieve it, then you can crow all you like because you will have earned it

I hope not

When any other team grinds out an ugly win despite being rusty and underperforming, they are lauded.

When it's Wales, they are criticised.

"It's only Italy" - yeah, who won twice last year. And England haven't done THAT well against them in the past two years - 18-11 last year wasn't it?

going to ask here - broadcasting question, before 1990 how was the 5 nations shown when 2 matches were played simultaneously? I do seem to think that bbc sco used to have sco bbc england and wales would show the other match? is this right?

England were criticised for that win last year, they weren't lauded anywhere from what I remember.

http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/news/s...154947299.html

Win is a win though.

Howcome Ireland get two songs?

Don't like the way Joubert is favouring the defence at thr breakdown. Why fly someone from South Africa to ruin a game?

i never get that. dont rate him as an official either, too fussy.

for a start they're are anthems not songs. It's complicated surfice to say politics play a part, a large part, I would suggest you read up on irish rugby history for the full reason.

in a nutshell games in the republic of Ireland two anthems are used - the irish national anthem and 'Irelands call' - at away games Irelands call only is used.

As I said its best if you read up on this as its quite a subjective issue.

Impressed with Scotland so far

Wales have a right to celebrate a good result over Italy yesterday whether or not it was great in the nature of their performance

It's not realised that Italy are a much improved side these days so people wrongly still expect Scotland Wales and Ireland to rack up 35+ with 4 or 5 tries in the process and England and France to score 50, 60 or 70 + with a hatful of tries, with Italy doing well to make double figures scoring just the one try against all of their opponents.

A win for all 5 of Italy's opponents v Italy by a margin of less than 10 points is as legitimately as good a win these days as 2 of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, England and France doing so against each other has always been.

NB: Italy have not always ended a 6 nations championship campaign with the wooden spoon and no points since they entered the competition.

Just because their team didn't destroy Italy by a big margin doesn't mean it was terrible. Time for people to stop expecting their team to thrash Italy by a massive margin every single time they meet. Italy are very competitive now.

I thought it was basically just the Republic of Ireland. I now see people from both Northern Ireland and the Republic can play for them. Seems a bit unfair that they can pick players from two different countries.

Yeah, it's deeply unfair that the island of Ireland has a whopping 6 million odd to choose from while poor England has to field a team from a paltry 53 million; and ickle France has to find some talent from 65 million. Good grief...............

The reason that the island of Ireland plays as a whole is that Ireland wasn't divided when the union was formed in the late 19th century. Google is your friend..............

On topic - impressive performance by Ireland today.