For England rugby, it was a Valentine’s evening to forget. There was a novel feeling to post-match proceedings as a side that had learned how not to lose remembered again how it felt to fall short; after an extended honeymoon period in the forging of a new identity through a run of 12 wins, here was the sort of showing that Steve Borthwick’s side had perhaps been due.
Cue talk of a learning experience, of taking the positives, of building back better, a once-familiar script returned to. “It is frustrating,” centre Fraser Dingwall said, before belabouring the point, using that word seven times in two minutes as he collected the thoughts of a muddled mind. He, and the rest of his England colleagues, could identify what went wrong – aerial inferiority, red-zone inefficiency, high-profile errors – but not really articulate why.
