England star Danny Care: Why I think Italy's tactics were out of order
ENGLAND'S try-scoring scrum-half was at the centre of the confusion on Saturday and thinks the radical approach of his former Harlequins director of rugby Conor O'Shea was out of order.
Eddie Jones after England's win: That wasn't rugby
I think Eddie has said everything that needs to be said about it. We all echo his thoughts. It's a pretty ridiculous rule. If teams feel they need to do that to make it a level playing field it's very negative.
I was with Ugo Monye having a haircut on Friday and I didn't realise he was on the phone to Conor [O'Shea]. I think Ugo wanted some help with his commentary, on the sort of things they were trying to do.
Ugo asked him if he had anything up his sleeve and Conor obviously said, 'no'. I said to him he was a liar but a good liar. Ever the politician Conor.
I'll be honest, I didn't know what was going on the first couple of times. I thought he [Gori] had seen a penalty or something.
They obviously came with a very strict game plan which they had been working on all week and they put it into play for a good part of the day but our class showed in the end.
Why the law is like that I don't know, but it's within the laws to do it. We've experienced it against us a couple of times, but only once or twice in certain games.
To have it in every breakdown is something new. It's another thing this team has experienced. We got through it and managed to find a way - it probably took us a bit longer to adapt than we wanted to but we did and we got five points. We'd have taken that at the start of the game.
There was obviously frustration but it's a measure of this team that we were down in the first half but didn't panic. I'm not sure what Scotland will do. They seem to be going all right defending normally at the moment.
It's up to them what they do. It was something we haven't experienced before but we have now so hopefully if it does happen again we will be better equipped to react to it.
I'm going to pick Conor's brains over a beer. He has gone from being the most attacking man in rugby to the most negative in one game. They felt they had to do it to try to get a result but they didn't.