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 Id 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 its my fault not the players. Ive been talking all week about the importance of playing field position in the first 20 minutes and maybe they over-emphasised.

If thats the case, Ill 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. Im not convinced many people believed me but theres 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.

Its pretty evident weve 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.