Wales v England, Six Nations Championship, February 14
Borthwick tells England to improve discipline
Scrum.com
February 11, 2009
Steve Borthwick of England look on during an England training session at the Pennyhill Park Hotel in Bagshot, England on November 18, 2008.
England skipper Steve Borthwick has called on his side to improve their discipline against Wales © Getty Images
Enlarge

England skipper Steve Borthwick has called on his players to improve their discipline against Wales at the Millennium Stadium on Saturday after James Haskell and Shane Geraghty both saw yellow cards against Italy. England have had six players sin-binned in their last two games, four against New Zealand in November, and handed victory to Australia by conceding a raft of kickable penalties.

The England camp has become so concerned with their disciplinary issues that they have spent time defending this week with only 14 men.

"It is to give players confidence that, should we lose a man, we will not lose anything defensively," explained defence specialist Mike Ford.

Borthwick has said that both Haskell (trip) and Geraghty's (taking the man out in the air) sin-binnings were avoidable and that they shouldn't allow Wales any extra advantage come Saturday.

"The last two games against Italy and New Zealand we have had sin-bins and we know they are not acceptable. We need to make sure we keep 15 players on the field for the whole game," he said. "Playing 20 minutes with a man down makes international rugby much harder. We need to reduce our penalty counts. We need greater levels of discipline and to make better decisions in that area. Both of those situations at the weekend were clearly avoidable.

"We have discussed what we need to do as a team and talked about what we deem to be acceptable behaviour and what isn't. We have crossed the line a little bit too often.

"This will be an incredible Test match. It will be immensely hard fought. We need to go out and play to our maximum and we need to ensure we don't give the opposition as many opportunities as they have had. If we don't give them opportunities the pressure remains heaped on them."

England have drawn derision in many quarters despite out-scoring then Italians by five tries to one, with Mauro Bergamasco's disastrous spell at scrum-half gifting them three, but Borthwick remains confident that England are improving.

"The mood in the group last week was very determined to start the Six Nations as well as we possibly can. We had lost our last three games at Twickenham, which was unacceptable, and we had to put that right," he said. "Moving on from that there is a great deal of confidence from a lot of the stuff we did very well. We won a Test by five tries to one and we look at the video and see lots of other chances we were creating.

"That gives us confidence that we are creating opportunities. It is up to us to take them. We haven't beaten Italy by that many points in a while, England haven't won a Six Nations game by five tries to one in a while. To do that and still know how much better we can play gives us real confidence."

© Scrum.com

Live Sports

Communication error please reload the page.