Eddie Jones has demanded England discard history by refusing to buy into the theme of Welsh supremacy in Cardiff when their Six Nations title defence resumes on Saturday.
Jones has highlighted a poor record during previous trips across the Severn Bridge, viewing the statistic of 21 wins from 61 visits dating back to 1882 as an anomaly.
England launched their Championship with a laboured 19-16 victory over France at Twickenham and Jones knows they will be ambushed in Wales if they do not adopt the right psychology.
“I’ve spoken to a number of people. There’s a certain story people like to paint when you’re playing Wales,” Jones said.
“If you get involved in painting that picture, you get involved in the painting. We don’t want to be involved in the painting, we want to paint our own picture.
Verdict
“And the picture we paint isn’t going to be the picture that was painted in the past.”
Jones on Saturday described the victory against France as “awful”, but on analysing the performance in more detail he has revised his verdict.
“Having watched the video again, we actually didn’t play that badly,” Jones said. “If you take away three or four easy dropped passes and some, at times, fragile defence, the majority of our game was pretty sound. The scrum improved a lot.
“We didn’t attack like England until the last 20 minutes of the game and our stats in that period were absolutely outstanding in terms of work rate, execution and effort. It was one of those games that looked worse when you saw it live, but having watched it again we weren’t far away from the money and we’re certainly on the way to playing a very good game against Wales.”
