England were awarded a penalty try before the break with Freddie Burns adding the conversion to go with his early penalty but couldn't convert decent field positions into points.
Their chances of the taking the Under 20 RBS 6 Nations title are still alive, though, following wins over Wales (41-14) and Italy (16-10) with difficult away games against Scotland and France to come.
England head coach Mark Mapletoft said:
"Overall we're very disappointed, not only with the result but also with the performance. You just can't make that many errors at any level and expect to win the game."
"The forwards have been pretty consistent with the way they've played and the set-piece has been good. But I just lost count of the number of times we coughed the ball up in and around their 22."
"Some of it was good defending on their part, getting over the ball strongly, but some of our option-taking was terrible. We did have a lot of territory and a lot of possession and then you're kind of amazed when you end up conceding 10 points when they have a guy in the sin bin. "
"It was a very bizarre game. We were five metres from their line and you're thinking we're 3-0 up and it's going to be 10-0 and then we make a poor decision, turn it over, they hack it through and score under the posts. That encapsulated the whole game."
"We just lack a cutting edge from 10 outwards. We did reasonably well against Wales in the second half. We tried to build on it against Italy and we didn't. This week, we looked hard at our alignment, trying to develop a bit of go-forward and we've just not delivered in the backs."
"We've played well for 30 minutes in three games and that was against Wales. Every time we moved the ball tonight we coughed it up and that's purely a decision-making process. If it's the same people making the same mistakes we have to pull them up."
Wing Jonny May (Gloucester Rugby) said:
"We can't seem to get the line-breaks, find our shape and organisationally we're poor. The forwards are doing a lot of hard work and it's us backs who are letting them down, unfortunately. It's individual errors. Their tries came from nothing, one mistake from me, one from a turnover, one from a kick. They took their chances well."
"I made a mistake for one try. It happens. It doesn't make me a bad player as long as I learn from it but right now it hurts. I will be judged for it but I've got to learn and move on."
"After every try they scored we stood under the posts and did think we were still in the driving seat, that we were the better team. But once they had three tries on the board we were chasing the game and they defended well. They put their bodies on the line and made it really hard. We couldn't find our shape and didn't look like scoring."
"Scotland and France will be hard but we've got to believe we are capable of winning them. We have nothing to lose now and we can go there. Grand Slam pressure is off now and we've got to prove ourselves as a team."
"No position for anyone is secure on the plane to Argentina [for the IRB Junior World Championship this summer]. I think we've got seven players out at the moment and every position is competitive. Everyone's got to keep putting their hands up and keep performing."
Content courtesy of RFU.
