Jamie George apologizes for England performance and explains next step

Jamie George has apologized to fans after England suffered their heaviest defeat in their Twickenham history a week before the toughest task in world rugby.

Sensational France kicked off with a 53-10 win on Saturday that cemented their status as World Cup favorites and kept alive their flickering hopes of lifting the Six Nations title.

But England were sad, and many fans responded to the most damning evidence of their team’s decline by puffing out the floor before the final whistle, while others booed to signal Steve Borthwick’s brief honeymoon was over.

Grand Slam chasers Ireland await the climax of the tournament at the Aviva Stadium on Saturday and with Andy Farrell’s men top of the world rankings, George knows an immediate response is needed.

“Fans who leave early are hard to take because I can understand that – I’m a fan myself,” said the veteran Saracens hooker.

“I want to apologize because I really am one of them. I would be disappointed if I had come to Twickenham to see an English team play like that.

“We’re sorry and we have to make sure we improve and learn from this experience because it’s clear we still have a long way to go.

“We haven’t been good enough for the English fans for a while and I can understand how they feel.

“But what I want to say to them is please stay with us as we will fight and brawl to make sure we are a significantly better team going forward. Hopefully we don’t disappoint them like that again.

“We didn’t play the second best team in the world. It’s not panic stations by any means, but some conversations need to be had about how we move away from it.

“With a result like that, you have two choices – you can turn around and throw your toy out of the stroller, or you can learn why it happened and what you need to do to fix it.

“We are suffering and we never want to feel that way again. They want to make sure we learn and get better because it’s a big six months now.”

Ireland underlined their title claim by beating Scotland 22-7 at Murrayfield on Sunday – despite an injury crisis unfolding on the pitch around them.

In a sign of their superiority over a side aiming to record just two wins in their third straight Six Nations, bookmakers have given the hosts high odds of their fourth Grand Slam.

“The coaches, the players – that hurts us. There is no doubt that we are hurt. We’re incredibly disappointed with what happened on this field,” Borthwick said.

“We never want that to happen. Now that it’s happened, we need to make sure we learn from it as soon as possible so that this type of feat never happens again.

“When you lose contact area as much as we did, you go backwards on offense, you go backwards on defense and that becomes very difficult to gain traction in the game.

“We found that there is a big difference between our current location and France.

“We know we have an incredible challenge ahead of us in seven days, so we have to do a lot better for that.”