Johnson: I can't believe we lost out

Grand Slams are to be treasured and one word summed up how I felt when watching yet another one slip through England's fingers - desolate.

No matter how many times you play for your country, you are not going to win many Slams in your career and now we've lost three on the trot. For that reason, I still feel like I did on Saturday in Dublin. You can never make up for those Grand Slams because they are gone forever and nothing you can say is going to bring them back.

The mood in the dressing-room reflected that. It was like a morgue.

We are Six Nations champions, we did score 100 points more than anyone else over the five matches, but we had nothing to celebrate. The sponsors gave us magnums of champagne but they've still to be opened because somehow the sound of popping corks wouldn't have felt right.

At half-time I just made a couple of points. But it didn't take a brain surgeon to work out what was going wrong - that almost the entire game was being played in our half and that we needed to gain some ground. Unfortunately, the Irish dominated territory for the first hour and that was crucial. We made enough breaks to have won but it's not easy when you are having to make those breaks from your third of the field. For all the mistakes and penalties we gave away, all the territory we lost, we still ended up just six points short at 20-14.

If Dan Luger had gone over, people would be talking about a great English comeback but our failure to play enough of the match in their territory meant we never gave ourselves a realistic chance of winning.

If anything, we probably tried to play too much rugby, trying to score tries from the first minute to the last. Sometimes it comes off, this time it didn't. Whether that was the right way to play or not is a matter for the post-match analysis, but it's easy to criticise in hindsight. With the line-out, it was a case of some lack of communication and a tendency to over-complicate. That contributed to the difficulties we had getting out of our own half. We never managed to build pressure on them until near the end, when the Irish defended really well. Nobody will give England any credit for going out to play an attacking game. That has produced some incredible results, not least 11 Test wins in a row, but it didn't work in Dublin because the Irish tactics were perfect; they put us under pressure and attacked very well when they had the chance.

I spoke about bottle in Saturday's column but what went wrong had nothing to do with any lack of courage. England were playing the ball wide from the first minute, playing their rugby from all over the field, but they won't get any credit for that because they lost. I remember England teams in the Eighties who didn't play as much rugby in an entire season as this team did in the first half.