Jonny Wilkinson insists England will "go with confidence" to Dublin for their historic visit to Croke Park in the Six Nations, despite failing to impress against Italy in Twickenham yesterday.
Although England preserved a 100 per cent record against Italy in 13 Tests, it was their smallest margin of victory over the Azzurri since a similarly uninspired World Cup qualification success at Huddersfield more than eight years ago.
England proved a poor imitation of the side that smashed Scotland seven days previously. The only similarity being that Wilkinson broke another record.
He followed his Calcutta Cup exploits — an individual-best 27 points — by booting five penalties to overtake former Wales star Neil Jenkins as the highest scorer in championship history.
But the sight of Wilkinson still kicking for goal with less than 30 seconds of normal time remaining graphically illustrated England's prolonged struggle to see off an Italy side whose work-rate and appetite for the battle knew no limits.
England, 14 points clear at the interval, "lost" a fiercely attritional second-half 7-6 as Italy conjured a memorable try, scored and converted by outhalf Andrea Scanavacca.
Ireland will hardly lose sleep when they review an England performance full of honest toil, but equally littered by poor tactical kicking, painfully slow ball and attacking indecision.
Even Wilkinson, a renowned master at putting his team in the right places, admitted to a degree of frustration.
He said: "When you are not on the front foot, teams are able to put three layers back in the kicking positions, which takes out your kicking option to turn people, and it means the opposition defence are in the starting blocks ready to come at you and hit you hard.
"We found life a little bit harder in the setpiece, and our organisation in the backline, myself very much included in that, needs a lot of work.
"Maybe we were a touch over-intense in terms of focusing on playing the game down in the right areas, and we didn't get everyone into the game."
England have not beaten Ireland since the 2003 Grand Slam showdown at Lansdowne Road and, unless dramatic improvements are shown on Saturday week, it is a sequence likely to continue.
Wilkinson added: "As a professional sportsman, you have confidence every time you go out on the field, but also you have confidence in how you react when things don't go your way, which is what we learnt in this game.
"Things weren't fantastic for us, but we battled through to stay ahead and keep ourselves relatively without threat.
"We will go with confidence to the Ireland game, face whatever happens and try to react the best we can."
