The captain was replaced after 54 minutes to cap a miserable afternoon for one of England’s greats and his team admitted their part in the collapse post-match. Flanker Underhill said: “We addressed it as a team that we couldn’t give him the day we wanted for him.

“He’s an incredibly gracious human being. He mentioned it himself, that’s sport, progress isn’t linear. Those were his words. We can still celebrate what an achievement 100 caps is. It’s disappointing but it doesn’t take the shine off what is a phenomenal individual accomplishment. He’s a phenomenal player, athlete, human being and leader.”

After last weekend’s Calcutta Cup flop, the defeat to Ireland put a pin in England’s balloon that had been flying high for a year.

Ensure our latest sport headlines always appear at the top of your Google Search by making us a Preferred Source. Click here to activate or add us as a Preferred Source in your Google search settings.

Underhill added: “We weren’t the best team in the world four weeks ago and we’re not the worst team now. We’ll stick at it and stay close as a group.”

The head coach admitted that he was “bitterly disappointed” with the performance at Twickenham on Saturday, promising to evaluate what went wrong and correct it to face Italy in two weeks’ time.

“Unfortunately, for two weeks now, we have given the opposition too many points and we have not got scoreboard presence,” he said. “We will be looking closely at that and how I set the team up to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

“Everybody can see we turned the ball over too many times. You get in field position opportunities to score and then you turn the ball over. Credit Ireland’s defence and Ireland at the breakdown. They were very, very strong there.

“Two weeks ago, there was a lot of talk about 12 wins on the bounce. People were saying all kinds of positive things about this team and not all of them were true. Right now, after two losses, people will be saying other things about this team and they won’t all be true either.

“The truth is somewhere in the middle. We are a team that has plenty of work to do, we know that. I have always said that. Ultimately, in the last two weeks, we have played against two high-quality teams and they have been better than us. Huge credit to Ireland, they took their chances and their kicking game was excellent.”