England coach Brian Ashton accepted the blame for his side's patchy performance in their 20-7 victory over Italy in the RBS 6 Nations at Twickenham.
With both sides scoring one try apiece, the difference came down to the goalkicking of Jonny Wilkinson, who sent over five penalties to follow up his record Calcutta Cup points haul against Scotland and break Neil Jenkins' championship record.
England failed to reach the heights of their 42-20 rout of the Scots and Ashton says he may have "got the balance of the game wrong".
‘I am delighted we won game and I'd like to congratulate Italy for rebounding from their defeat against France,’ he said.
‘I thought, especially in the second half, their forwards played well and put a stranglehold on our game. I think we probably got the balance of our game wrong right from the start.
‘And, if that is the case, then it's my fault not the players. I've been talking all week about the importance of playing field position in the first 20 minutes and maybe they over-emphasised. If that's the case, I'll hold my hand up and say I got it wrong.’
England scored their only try in first-half injury time through Jason Robinson, who pounced for his third touchdown in his second comeback match, but were outscored in the second half by the spirited Azzurri.
Ashton admits his side will need to find major improvement for their next match against Ireland in Croke Park on Sunday week.
‘I said all week what a difficult game this would be,’ added Ashton. ‘I'm not convinced many people believed me but there's the evidence.
‘It took us until the last 10 minutes of the first half last week to get the dynamism in our game. Half-time came too early for us. If we had had another 10 minutes, we might have broken the back of it.
‘But, fair play to Italy, they came out in the second half and stopped us getting any dynamism to our game. It became a tight contest. It's pretty evident we've go a lot of work to do, but we knew we would have.
‘This is a team that has played twice together and it needs to play more to get some familiarity and, after today, need to develop and ability to think about how we progress the game.’
The 82,000 Twickenham crowd booed England's decision to continually kick for goal but Ashton defended Wilkinson's role in the win.
He said: ‘If you've got a kicker like that in your side, you are going to say ‘take the points'.’
England lost full-back Iain Balshaw with a slight groin tear and centre Mike Tindall with a dead leg.
