England World Cup winner Mike Tindall has said that Ireland got manhandled by England during the 57-15 rout of Joe Schmidt’s side at Twickenham last weekend.
Ireland missed 37 tackles and won just nine of 15 line-outs on a shambolic afternoon in London as Ireland suffered their worst ever defeat to England in their second warm-up game.
England racked up 458 metres compared to Ireland’s 255 metres and Tindall said on this week’s episode of House of Rugby that Ireland were manhandled by Eddie Jones’ side.
“For a while I have seen them very one styled and unfortunately people have figured out that if you put pressure on them… what can they do?
“I thought the 10 who played, [Ross] Byrne is his name, not sure he’s quite up to it. It’s one of those things if you can stop Irish forwards going forward.. but it didn’t help that their line-out was an absolute shambles.
“You don’t expect that from Ireland and I don’t think you’ll get it again this week against Wales. They just had no go forward, Furlong just got manhandled, they all just got manhandled.
“My issues with them was defensively they were shocking. If you look at their organisation they either crapped themselves, which in my opinion is why Manu has to play 13.
“England opened them up three times from set piece moves. Obviously [Joe] Cokanasiga threw in a physical threat as well but they just bit on Manu every line he ran.
“Even when they had a right-handed scrum where you have a nine as your inside defender, they all just jumped in. They got tight all the time, the two tries where they got scored in the corner.
“How they started with their first try where they gave the ball a bit of air ‘I was like ooh, here we go, they might actually throw the ball around a little bit’, and then they went back to one out runners, no tip runners and our boys just got in their face and smashed them basically.”
