Hello and welcome to England’s team announcement for their Six Nations match with Ireland, live from their Pennyhill Park base in Surrey.
At 2pm today, Steve Borthwick will confirm the matchday 23 to face Grand Slam-chasing Ireland at Twickenham on Saturday (4.45pm kick-off).
As exclusively revealed yesterday by Telegraph Sport, Immanuel Feyi-Waboso will be named on the wing, to start his first Test for England, in place of Elliot Daly, who will be among the replacements. George Martin will start in the second row, with Ollie Chessum expected to shift to blindside flanker. Alex Mitchell is expected to return at scrum-half, with George Ford holding off the challenge of the now fit Marcus Smith at 10. Smith’s namesake, Fin, picked up a calf strain this week.
England’s head coach will be hoping for a response after the backwards step taken at Murrayfield, with England having defeated both Italy and Wales beforehand.
The most damning statistic to emerge from a fourth successive Calcutta Cup defeat was the 25 handling errors made, a staggering number that prevented their attack from functioning.
“That was an anomaly for us. We certainly haven’t seen that throughout training at all,” Sinfield said.
“We’ve worked particularly hard in trying to understand why it happened. Some of it is difficult to understand.
“When you’re trying to understand why someone’s dropped a ball, or someone’s thrown a pass without looking where the pass is going, there’s a bit more to it than the numbers.
“We’re trying to understand the people, what they are feeling and what they are seeing at that moment in time. So we’ve delved pretty deep into that.
“We put some balls down in the Scotland game, why that is we’ll never know for sure. But what we have to try to make sure is that it doesn’t happen again.”