I really like Owen Farrell as a bloke, but I wasn’t going to allow him to speak to me like he did at Twickenham on Saturday night which is why we had a spat.
I’ve got no issue with Owen – we’ve been team-mates with the Lions – but he made it personal by coming at me in the second half at Twickenham.
‘Stop complaining,’ was what Farrell said in my direction, just after he’d hit Taine Basham high. I thought it was a clear red card and was just airing my view.
I told Farrell that people are allowed to have a go at him. He’s not above everyone else. Owen is such a competitive guy, just like I am, and it was a heat-of-the-moment incident.
I was very surprised Farrell and Freddie Steward weren’t sent off immediately. Both were given yellow cards, but Owen’s was upgraded to a red by the new television bunker system.
Owen Farrell performed a ‘no-arms’ tackle in the second half that got him into trouble
After a TMO review, Farrell was shown a red card and may miss some of the World Cup
I did not like the way Farrell spoke to me after the decision, and told him he deserved to be sent off
That will mean he’s likely to get a ban, one which could rule him out of the start of England’s World Cup campaign. As much as we went head-to-head at Twickenham, the World Cup will be all the poorer if Owen is forced to be on the sidelines. It will be a big blow to England.
I think our flashpoint became a big thing because England were on the ropes at the time. They were under pressure after what was a pretty poor first half. That’s probably putting it kindly!
It was a very, very ugly game of rugby and it was absolute carnage at the end with all the cards!
It was crazy on the pitch, with lots of disruption and not much control to the game.
There were six cards in total, four for England and two for Wales but I’ll admit I definitely lost count at one point!
From a Wales perspective, we were very disappointed to lose. England celebrated very hard at the final whistle but personally, I don’t mind that. They have been on a losing run, they lost to us in Cardiff last weekend, and they’ve been copping plenty of pelters in the media.
If they’d lost to us at home too then they’d have really had both barrels! I think both teams won’t be especially happy after the two matches we’ve had in the last fortnight.
When we played England in Cardiff last week, they played a lot of rugby off nine and tried to batter the door down. We picked a team full of young guys with plenty of new caps. They were hungry and all they wanted was tackling practice! It worked in our favour.
I have no issue with Farrell, our flashpoint came as England were under significant pressure
At Twickenham, I thought it was more of the same from England really.
Their game is heavily reliant on go forward and how many collisions they win. They probably didn’t do enough of that last weekend.
I spoke to England’s analyst – who is a Welshman – after the first game and he said they made 14 handling errors. You’re never going to win a Test with that many mistakes.
England’s approach is ‘Can we go over the top of you first?’ before looking to go wide and on the whole, I think we’ve done pretty well in stopping them in the two matches.
Are England World Cup challengers? It’s hard to say after two games but they’ve been under the radar. You’d say they’ve got a bit of work to do, similar to ourselves, to be chucked out as challengers right now. But if you ask me that in four weeks, it could be a completely different answer.
What I thought England did really well at Twickenham was use their spiral bombs and their kicking game to retain possession. Owen and George Ford are very, very good at that.
I’m sure that like us, England will want to improve on what they’ve shown in the last fortnight. I know that’s definitely the case in the Welsh camp.
There has certainly been plenty of rustiness from both sides and that has been the reason why you’ve seen so many mistakes.
What’s important to remember for any team going to the World Cup is that it’s better to be below par now than in a month’s time when it really matters!
From a Wales perspective, to lose from 17-9 up against a team who went down to 12 is really, really disappointing. That will hurt us in our review on Monday, I can tell you that for free!
We need to learn the lessons from that. We didn’t win as many games as we’d have wanted to last season and winning becomes a habit. It’s a habit we want to get into so it would have been great to get the ‘W’ on the back of our victory on Cardiff.
But at the same time, World Cup warm-ups aren’t all about the result and I think we’ve done a lot of good things in the two games we’ve had with England.
There were big celebrations from England at the end, showing how much that pre-World Cup clash meant to them
It was disappointing to lose, but we are still building towards the World Cup in France
It would have been great to go two from two going into our final World Cup warm-up with South Africa in Cardiff on Saturday. We’re not, but it’s not all bad news.
We need to use the game with the Springboks to put a final marker down before Warren Gatland names the final squad for France. I’d love to start in Cardiff against the Boks.
But I must admit that at 33, I’m quite enjoying my 20-minute cameos off the bench! They’re much better for the body than playing from the off.
Whether I’m picked or not, I’ll give it my all like every player in this Wales squad. We’re looking forward to the World Cup now and like England, we can still get better.
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