Coach, captain’s futures hang in the balance

England feeling the heat after rout by Australia

STUART Lancaster will consider his future as coach after Saturday’s crushing defeat by Australia which ensured England will be the first main host to fail to reach the knock-out stage of rugby’s showpiece tournament.

“Yeah, obviously. I think obviously I’ve got to,” Lancaster told reporters in response to a question about his future.

“It’s not one for now. We’ve still got another week to go. We have to go up to Manchester and put in a good performance against Uruguay,” he added, referring to England’s final opponents in Pool A.

Criticised by former players for England’s displays on the field, Lancaster has won plaudits for reconnecting the national side with its fan base after a poor tournament in New Zealand in 2011.

He urged the country not to turn on a young England team that was comprehensively outthought and out-fought over the 80 minutes, going down to Australia 33-13 in front of their home fans, some of whom started leaving well before the end.

“It’s important that the country stays behind them. For 24 of them it’s their first World Cup,” Lancaster said.

“And a lot of them are going to go on and be great players.”

Lancaster, who was also booed by sections of the crowd during a pitch-side interview after the game, conceded his team appeared to lack the killer instinct, having come up short against Australia after losing to Wales 28-25.

“It was a tough pool and we put ourselves in a real tough position by losing that game last week and that was a small margin and big consequence in hindsight,” Lancaster sad.

Wales and Australia will now do battle for the top of Pool A – dubbed the group of death because it included three of the top-ranked sides in he world.

Rubbing salt into English wounds, that match will take place at Twickenham, the home of English rugby.

Saturday’s defeat meant England became the first former winners of the Webb Ellis Cup to fail to make the quarterfinals.

England captain Chris Robshaw, whose own performances and leadership have come under fire from rugby commentators, said he too would be considering his future.

“I think this week we’re going to have to answer some tough questions. At the moment we’re extremely gutted. Myself and the other players, we feel we let a lot of people down today, let the country down,” Robshaw said.

“Credit to Australia, I think the better team probably won, they put us under a lot of pressure in all facets of the game really.”

England’s only major area of improvement from last week’s Wales defeat was discipline at the breakdown, where they were barely penalised on Saturday.

However, it counted for little because Australia did not need the referee’s help in that key area as they had their twin spoilers extraordinaire Michael Hooper and David Pocock to force their usual unequal share of turnovers.

That the Wallabies came out top in that battle would have surprised nobody but to see the English pack on the receiving end of the sort of scrum dusting they have routinely handed the Wallabies over the years was a real eye-opener.

Australia came into the match promising that they had improved their scrum, but then they always do. This time it was not empty rhetoric though and by the last 10 minutes England’s replacement-laden scrum was on roller skates and the disbelieving home fans were heading for the exits.

The wisely-timed intervention of former Australia coach Bob Dwyer certainly seemed to work its magic as French referee Roman Poite routinely warned England prop Joe Marler about not scrummaging straight, just as Dwyer had highlighted in the media in the build-up.

Marler, who had been spoken to by the officials in England’s previous two matches, this time found himself right in Poite’s crosshairs and he was eventually hauled to the bench seemingly to avoid him being sin-binned.

Though it must have stuck in his throat to say it, England’s World Cup-winning coach Clive Woodward declared: “The Aussie scrum was magnificent.”

Lancaster bemoaned a few of the early scrum penalties that he felt were harsh on his team but even he had to admit that “in the end we weren’t hard-done-to”.