Six Nations: This England team is drowning in mediocrity - Oliver Brown

Tommy Freeman of England looks dejected during the Six Nations 2025 defeat to Ireland. Photo / Getty Images

• England’s inconsistent performance continued, with defensive lapses leading to a 22-point deficit against Ireland.
• Late tries by Tom Curry and Tommy Freeman narrowed the loss, but offered little consolation.
• Steve Borthwick’s team struggles with consistency, raising concerns about their ability to compete effectively.

True England fans do not chastise their national team gratuitously. On the contrary, they yearn to extol their virtues, to dwell on the signs of development rather than those of decline. You sensed this impulse early in the second half here, when the first swell of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot stirred amid a sea of green.

For once there seemed to be heartening defiance, both in the discipline of the defence and the relentless targeting of Sam Prendergast. And yet the one truly timeless quality of Steve Borthwick’s team is to kill you with false hope.

It is as if they have a split personality, or simply an unlimited capacity for self-destruction. Even poor Cadan Murley was drawn into this pattern, the young Harlequins wing overwhelmed with joy at his early try but then haunted by his own naivete in failing to touch the ball down in his goal area, enabling James Lowe and Hugo Keenan to bundle him out of play.

So adept have England become at flattering to deceive that you can watch a wonderfully talented 25-year-old morph from hero to zero in the space of a single Test.

True, they added a thin layer of respectability, with Tom Curry and Tommy Freeman darting in for two late tries that narrowed the margin of inferiority from 17 points to five. But a bonus point felt the most hollow of consolations in the circumstances.

For Dublin should have offered England a platform for a resurgence, a chance to show that the painful lessons of three autumn defeats had been heeded. Instead, they regressed. There is no other way of putting it – not when their response to criticisms of their routine final-quarter collapses was to extend that ineptitude across the entire second half.

In 2024, you could count on England to be hapless for 20 minutes. Their only apparent adjustment in 2025 is to repeat that trick for 30 at least. The excuse offered by Borthwick was that his team were too inexperienced to avoid such a wobble. But for how much longer is this credible? These were not wide-eyed ingenues wearing the rose here. In Maro Itoje, Ellis Genge, Luke Cowan-Dickie and Tom Curry, there were four players with 252 caps between them. There comes a point where the constant attempt to use youth as mitigation becomes an insult to supporters’ intelligence.

England players also appeared convinced in the aftermath that they had made giant strides in their attack. Seriously? Against an Ireland team committing far more errors than was customary, they did not score a try between the 10th and 76th minute. They would do far better to be honest than to take everybody for fools. For the brutal reality is that England are positively drowning in mediocrity, so accustomed to throwing away advantages that it is now a habit, not an anomaly.

Itoje, to his credit, never stopped toiling, justifying his elevation to the captaincy with his hounding of Prendergast and his clear communication with referee Ben O’Keeffe. Elsewhere there were worries aplenty amid the players trusted to bring shape and stability. Marcus Smith faded badly after some early flourishes, while Freddie Steward looked panicky on his restoration at fullback, turning about as nimbly as an aircraft carrier.

How quickly the optimism was extinguished. Borthwick had drawn plenty of plaudits with his selections here, lauded for pulling a rabbit out of the hat in Murley and for packing his back row with the explosive power of the Curry twins. Few set out to savage the head coach for the sake of it. But people are growing tired of seeing the same implosions and hearing the same specious justifications. At some stage, England need to shelve their delusions, demonstrating that they are capable of aggression and accuracy for 80 minutes, not in fitful bursts. Otherwise, all faith in the Borthwick project will evaporate.

It is still early February, there are still snowdrops on the ground, but already this Six Nations is at best an exercise in damage limitation for England. With any dream of a Grand Slam or a Triple Crown dashed, the summit of their ambition is to finish third. An impression grows that this tournament has splintered into three distinct sub-groups, with France and Ireland out on their own, Wales and Italy vying for the wooden spoon, and England and Scotland scrambling for some semblance of mid-table respectability. But you could not help but look at how England floundered under pressure here, shipping 22 unanswered points, and conclude it was anything but respectable.

Yes, they summoned a belated riposte, but only when Ireland eased off in the knowledge that the game was won at 27-10. The time for showing this spirit was when the game was in the balance, when the hosts were growing frustrated by their frequent failures to capitalise in England’s 22. Instead, they folded horribly, with Steward struggling and Chandler Cunningham-South giving away the careless penalty that led to Tadhg Beirne’s try. Where was the character, the resilience, the fortitude?

Consider this: Borthwick’s winning percentage across his 26 months in the job now stands at 50, the lowest of any England coach since Andy Robinson in 2006. His only two victories since the last Six Nations have come against an enfeebled Japan. In the event of a humiliation against France next Sunday, these inadequacies will be thrown into even sharper relief. Fans deserve to have some evidence that he is building a project behind which a country can unite. That is quite a leap of imagination, sadly, when they see only a team with this immutable gift for self-sabotage.