England's preparations for their tour of South Africa have suffered a setback, as they lost 63-45 to Pat Lam's Barbarians - their fourth straight defeat - in a non-cap match at Twickenham.
The hosts fielded a mixture of regular internationals and young players on Sunday (local time), but the inexperienced line-up was no match for the power of the Barbarians, who ran in nine tries in an entertaining game full of running rugby.
Former All Black Victor Vito scored a double, while winger Chris Ashton, who has 39 caps for England, grabbed a hat-trick for the Barbarians inside 25 minutes, as they crossed the line five times in the first half.
Vito was twice the beneficiary of some exhilarating play by Fijian winger Josua Tuisova, who found space down the right wing, before the Top 14's Player of Year dotted down.
Code-hopper and Toulon centre Semi Radradra also got on the scoresheet, while former Blues back Piers Francis crossed twice for the hosts.
"We weren't good enough by a long way," said England co-captain George Ford.
"We'll have to have a look at it because we can't be performing like that.
"We're massively disappointed. No matter what game you're playing in, when you put the England shirt on you expect to be better than that.
"We understand that the step up from club rugby to playing world-class international players is a big one and we learnt that lesson."
Asked if the loss was embarrassing, Ford replied: "It is, yeah. It's not great, is it? We didn't start well and some of the tries seemed like easy, soft scores.
"I know there were some great scores from the Baa-Baas. But defensive is a mental thing, an effort thing, an attitude thing."
Jones put a philosophical spin on the outcome, having been unable to select 10 Saracens players and five Exeter players who featured in Saturday's English premiership final.
"You've got to look at what the game is," said Jones.
"We don't have our top 15 players and we have another 22 players unavailable, so it was a test of our depth.
"We played against a very good, fast, powerful Barbarians team and at times we struggled to cope with that."
"As an experience for some of the young players it was absolutely outstanding. I was just speaking to a number of them then and they just struggled to cope with the speed of the game."
Barbarians coach Pat Lam was beaming with pride in his star-studded invitational team.
"I'm hugely proud and honoured. I said before that we'd celebrate the five days that we've had and the relationship building exercises that we've had right throughout the week," Lam said.
"We have lots of X-factor players and lot of players who can play as individuals, but in our beautiful game of rugby it's nothing to do with individuals but about team work."
Newshub/Reuters
