England v Australia, Sat 13 Nov KO 5.30pm

[morepork]

FFS. Some of these penalties are too much man.

[Danno]

Come on Marcus, go fast, there's an actual team to play with for a whole 8 mins

[Danno]

FFS. Some of these penalties are too much man.

Peyper by name, piper by nature

[morepork]

England take off the Fainting Goat of the forward pack.

[WaspInWales]

Here we go. 5 mins to open the floodgates

[WaspInWales]

This is the worst I have seen Australia play for quite some time.

[jngf]

Don’t you just love Jones - picks Simmonds with 5 mins left and sticks him on the wrong flank

[WaspInWales]

We have no maul at all!!!!

[WaspInWales]

Fucking hell Slade.

[Mellsblue]

Bloody Slade. Always less than the sum of his parts.

[morepork]

Fucking hell Slade.

Can he not pass when running straight, or what?

[oldbackrow]

Looks like we'll win it but not really convinced by the performance after a good start. Didn't look like Aus could win or score a try but we were meh!

[WaspInWales]

That's Simmonds dropped.

[WaspInWales]

Absolutely dismal performance. The scoreline flatters us massively, but with the right approach, England could have won by 40 points easily.

Jones has to stop fucking about now.

[Mellsblue]

Poor performance. Gleason has a lot of work to do.

[jngf]

Please can Itoje learn to carry with some more omph! That’s the one thing Johnny Hill does far better in all honesty. Lawes reverts to type of a lock playing in the back row - given boks will use likely Quagga at 7 , the justification for Lawes at 6 has rather fizzled out imo

[Danno]

Please can Itoje learn to carry with some more omph! That’s the one thing Johnny Hill does far better in all honesty. Lawes reverts to type of a lock playing in the back row

That's your takeaway? Come on.

[WaspInWales]

Positives though...Steward one tiny mistake on another fine performance. Smith was good when he had time but seriously hampered with Farrell at 10. Tuilagi had some decent ball time and made a few nice runs. Dombrandt carried well in his first cameo and Hill was lively too.

Youngs was dire. Slade fucked up at least two big opportunities. What has happened to our maul? Completely nullified by Australia. We didn't have the dominance in the scrum that I thought we would have. There was no improvement in attack and we left a shedload of points out there and still didn't look like we would score them.

Never felt so deflated after beating Australia this comfortably.

SA will sleep well this week.

[jngf]

On the maul point this shows how badly we’re missing Launch. Eddy Jones knows how to win ugly if you like that sort of thing - style forget it

[fivepointer]

Final score added some gloss to a pretty lacklustre performance overall.

This was not a good Aussie side and England should have done more with the possession and territory they enjoyed.

Steward was outstanding and the obvious bright spot. Massive improvement required for SA.

[jngf]

Dylan Hartley commentary is less than unbiased (shades of Vickery me thinks )

[Puja]

Don’t you just love Jones - picks Simmonds with 5 mins left and sticks him on the wrong flank

I saw that and thought of you

That was a dire game, especially having watched the Ireland vs NZ game beforehand. The mix-and-match backline is a nice idea in theory, but it's just got too many moving parts and too many players having to think about where they should be to work. Slade was on the wing when covering kicks, Smith was there from set piece defence, Tuilagi was there in loose play except when he was coming in at centre and in that case everyone shuffled out one - no-one was 100% sure of what they were doing and it showed.

Our tight 5 is filled with players who aren't good enough: Rodd, Blamire, Davidson, Hill, Ewels. Some of that is unavoidable with injury, but other bits are pure selection - Mako should not have been dropped just because Eddie wants to be unpredictable and Lawes is doing a (surprisingly) very good job at 6 but when we have no good 5s we don't have the luxury of playing him there.

All things told, a scrappy performance, not helped by a pedantic ref, but helped immensely by a terrible Australia who let us get away with opting out of attacking for the middle 70 minutes of the game.

We'll lose to South Africa next week. The only way to win would be to outplay them and turn on the style and we've specifically avoided preparing that, so I suspect we're going to try and outmuscle them and come up short.

Puja

[WaspInWales]

So, the take home message appears to be that the Smith - Farrell, or rather the Farrell - Smith partnership apparently went well then?

[FKAS]

Positives though...Steward one tiny mistake on another fine performance. Smith was good when he had time but seriously hampered with Farrell at 10. Tuilagi had some decent ball time and made a few nice runs. Dombrandt carried well in his first cameo and Hill was lively too.

Youngs was dire. Slade fucked up at least two big opportunities. What has happened to our maul? Completely nullified by Australia. We didn't have the dominance in the scrum that I thought we would have. There was no improvement in attack and we left a shedload of points out there and still didn't look like we would score them.

Never felt so deflated after beating Australia this comfortably.

SA will sleep well this week.

Eh? His kicking controlled the game for England and he got the side moving when it was on. We'd have had another try earlier had Peyper not blocked him as he switched play in the Aussie 22 just after half time.

Scruffy performance but we controlled the game and put Australia to the sword fairly comfortably. Got some good experience into some young players.

Needs some fine tuning and the attack clearly hasn't settled yet but it's not going to just be there straight off the bat as we haven't played any meaningful games before today since the 6N ended.

[FKAS]

Don’t you just love Jones - picks Simmonds with 5 mins left and sticks him on the wrong flank

I saw that and thought of you

That was a dire game, especially having watched the Ireland vs NZ game beforehand. The mix-and-match backline is a nice idea in theory, but it's just got too many moving parts and too many players having to think about where they should be to work. Slade was on the wing when covering kicks, Smith was there from set piece defence, Tuilagi was there in loose play except when he was coming in at centre and in that case everyone shuffled out one - no-one was 100% sure of what they were doing and it showed.

Our tight 5 is filled with players who aren't good enough: Rodd, Blamire, Davidson, Hill, Ewels. Some of that is unavoidable with injury, but other bits are pure selection - Mako should not have been dropped just because Eddie wants to be unpredictable and Lawes is doing a (surprisingly) very good job at 6 but when we have no good 5s we don't have the luxury of playing him there.

All things told, a scrappy performance, not helped by a pedantic ref, but helped immensely by a terrible Australia who let us get away with opting out of attacking for the middle 70 minutes of the game.

We'll lose to South Africa next week. The only way to win would be to outplay them and turn on the style and we've specifically avoided preparing that, so I suspect we're going to try and outmuscle them and come up short.

Puja

I thought Blamire grew into the game. A young man worth persevering with as third choice for me. Rodd is 21 in prop terms he's a baby and he's only playing because of five better options being unavailable. The lock stocks are an ongoing concern though I agree there.