England focus on tackling in a bid to avoid another red card nightmare against France 

England’s players have been working on their tackle technique to avoid another red card disaster in France.

Lock Charlie Ewels was sent off for a high shot after just 82 seconds on Saturday and England subsequently fell to a record defeat by Ireland.

Ewels will face a disciplinary hearing on Wednesday and team-mate Sam Simmonds revealed there has since been added focus on collision area.

Sam Simmonds revealed England have working on their tackle technique this week

‘Knowing Charlie well, there was no malice in the tackle but he was too high and he has caught heads, so unfortunately it is a red card,’ said No8 Simmonds. ‘It is more a technical issue than a physicality issue.

‘The height in the tackle is probably something that everyone needs to work on. You don’t want to be going to high against a huge French pack anyway. It is something we talked about this week. 

‘Our chop tackles need to be good. Our second man needs to wrap the ball up because they love to offload. They are very good in unstructured play. That is probably where they got most of their momentum. 

‘We have talked about our tackle height and just chopping the big fellas down, making them get up, chopping them down, making them get up and hopefully they tire to the end of the game.’ 

Charlie Ewels (second from R) was sent off after just 82 seconds of England’s Six Nations clash with Ireland

Ewels was deemed to have made contact with his head when challenging James Ryan

Having failed to breach the try-line against Ireland, England are also hoping their attack comes to life in Paris. There has been a lack of English line breaks so far during the Six Nations and Simmonds admits the team are still searching for their attacking identity.

‘I haven’t been involved in the last three, four, five campaigns but, I guess, the way that people perceived England was that they didn’t attack too well,’ said Simmonds. 

‘When you go down to 14 men against a very good side, you can’t attack from everywhere when the media and fans might want us to. When you play against a good side sometimes the 50-50s or 60-40s are too high a risk to take.

‘Going forward, we definitely want to have more of an identity in attack. I don’t want to be running into brick walls all the time. I want to be in space and attacking in the wider channels. It’s something that we’re working on. It hasn’t clicked properly yet but we’re getting better in training and better in games. It’s the identity of knowing when we can do it and when we can’t.’