WORLD CUP BUILD-UP

“We would have had a better chance of doing well at the World Cup if we had been allowed to train at our club.”

“The man-management was absolutely terrible.”

WORLD CUP PERFORMANCES

“To go into World Cup games not having a game-plan, any structure or clear idea of what we were going to do in attack was astonishing.”

“I really can’t believe we lasted as long as we did in the tournament. We played like crap.”

COACHING

“At our club there is a brutally honest policy. If you mess up, you are b--------d and understand you have let your team-mates down. In England there was a no-blame/excuse culture where you swept things under the carpet.”

“We can’t just blame the coaches for the predicament we got in. Look at France, they couldn’t stand their coach and they almost won the World Cup.”

MARTIN JOHNSON

“It wasn’t Johnno, it was that Johnno was surrounded by the wrong people.”

“We just wanted Johnno to have the b-------s to take action, especially after the Tindall night. He was too loyal and that was his downfall.”

TEAM SELECTION

“Jonny Wilkinson is not an attacking threat any more. We really needed (Toby) Flood because he is the one who bosses the team. Floody was part of the reason England played well in the Six Nations.”

“Some guys were frustrated because guys were being picked on what they had done in the past, not how they were playing now.”

CAPTAIN

“We didn’t really have a good captain.”

“If you lead by example and by putting your body on the line, surely that leadership is weakened if the team is questioning whether he is physically able to do what his mind wants him to do.”

DISCIPLINE

“The environment was a bit too jokey and disrespectful.”

“There was a culture where it was not cool to train hard. What happened to the culture where everyone was training to be the best in the world?”

“To hear one senior player in the changing room say straight after the quarter-final defeat ’There’s £35k just gone down the toilet’ made me feel sick. Money shouldn’t even come into a player’s mind.”

“You sense for some players it was more about getting cash and caps than about getting better.”

DRINKING

“If it’s the senior players leading drinking games or drinking until they can’t remember anything, what example are the younger players set?”

“As a group, we behaved like everyone should pander to our every need. At times we were mindless and reckless.”

“It’s our own fault we came back so unpopular.”

MEDIA

“We all had our guard up because of the advice. As we didn’t give them (the press) anything, they were obviously going to find something else to write about.”

“The media guys kept making a mountain out of a molehill.”

“A siege mentality developed. The English press seemed to want us to mess up.“