George Ford: There are too many errors in training – it is not good enough

George Ford has admitted England have not even been training well as he called on his team-mates to tighten up if they are to recover from Saturday’s historic loss to Fiji and succeed at the World Cup.

The Pacific Islanders conquered England for the first time at Twickenham, with Ford bemoaning the lack of consistency and error count in training as primary reasons for the shock defeat.

With less than two weeks to go until England’s tournament opener, against Argentina on Sept 9, the fly-half believes that better application away from match day will be the golden ticket for Steve Borthwick’s side in Marseille.

“There’s an urgency that we need to fix it and get better,” Ford, 30, said after the 30-22 loss. “We’re not brushing that under the carpet by any stretch of the imagination. We’ll be honest and up front about it because it’s costing us at the moment. The way you do that is to be more consistent in training. We’re clearly not consistent in training, there are probably too many errors in training and we’re probably playing the way we train at the minute, which is not good enough obviously.

“We don’t want the benefit of the doubt, we know we haven’t played well enough and know the results haven’t been good enough. Steve is unbelievable at his meticulous planning and we’ll have a brilliant plan for Argentina. When you lose for England you understand what’s going to come with it. We’re not shying away from that. We’re going to stick together and sort ourselves out in terms of making our preparation as good as it can be for Argentina. I’m comfortable we’ll be in a good place.”

Despite a disappointing warm-up campaign in which England have registered just one win in four matches – against Wales at Twickenham – Ford is “more than confident” that the side will be ready for the challenge of Argentina – and singled out the impact of late call-up Alex Mitchell, at scrum-half.