Alun Wyn Jones determined to put Wales’s Six Nations defeat to England right as soon as possible

Rather like Popeye losing on a split decision to Bluto, Wales having to pick through the positives of a defeat to England is always a painful experience. Yet with some justification, Alun Wyn Jones was determined to locate the reasons for hope among all the despondency.

Granted, there has been, and will continue to be, plenty of finger pointing in the aftermath. At Rob Howley’s decision to replace the rampaging Ross Moriarty with almost half an hour to go. At Jonathan Davies’s exit kick in the 76^th minute going straight to George Ford, who via Owen Farrell, set up Elliott Daly’s match-winner. At the hapless Alex Cuthbert daring to show the outside to the flying winger. And at captain Jones himself for declining to go for the posts on two occasions.

Yet while acknowledging that this was a game Wales could and should won, Jones first berated the BBC pitchside interviewer, for one question containing what he adjudged to be “an air of negativity”, and then emerged half-an-hour or so afterwards from a broken dressing room claiming that the focus is now on on Murrayfield.

“The competitors in us would like to play again tomorrow,” Jones said. “But we’ve got two weeks to regroup. We improved from the Italy game, and we will continue to work to do that. England was as good as we said they were, but we matched them with the physicality and were able to stop the momentum they had coming into the game. We’ve four minutes to work on and I know I sound like a broken record and if you go back a few years, we were probably saying the same thing, but the vast majority of the performance was a vast improvement on the 35 minutes that have been missing in the past. Yet we fell short. Simple as.”