Coach Eddie Jones and captain Owen were united in their appraisal of Saturday’s match against Georgia as being “tough”, despite England winning 40-0 and being in control for almost all of their opening Autumn Nations Cup encounter.
Three rolling maul tries for hooker Jamie George and further scores for debutant Jack Willis, Elliot Daly and Dan Robson took England to success in a game played in difficult, rainy conditions.
“Good tough game. Georgia obviously came out and wanted to play a certain way, and we wanted to prove a point that they wouldn’t be able to out scrum us,” Jones said.
“When you play in these conditions it is enormously important and if you get an opportunity to keep the ball, it’s a way of scoring tries. We are used to playing any conditions and we can adapt to whatever is going on.
“We didn’t allow them to get into the game and the underdog has been able to get into the game a lot in sport recently, but we didn’t allow them to upset us. We would have liked to have executed a bit better because we maybe left 20 points out there.
“We are trying to create depth in every position. Jack (Willis) and Max (Malins) showed they are capable of playing test rugby, so now they have to fight hard to keep getting selected.”
Farrell was singing from the same hymn sheet when he said: “Tough conditions against a tough opposition. When the weather is like this and it’s an up-front challenge against Georgia it is tough, but I thought the forwards stood up to it.
“Georgia pride themselves on the set piece but so do we, to do what we did in the first 10 minutes and the amount of scrums we had and the amount of opportunities we had was brilliant.
“There was a lot of good stuff out there but we will take a look at being more clinical.”
