As a follow up to yesterday’s post, here are some of the comments given by the players questioned in the report, and boy, did they have a lot to say.

Telegraph

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

“It wasn’t hard, it was just LONG. We felt physically and mentally drained at the end.”

“The man-management was absolutely terrible.”

“All the plans we’d worked on for weeks suddenly went out the window because they didn’t happen to work in one game.”

“There wasn’t enough emphasis on conditioning.”

“There were two massive playbooks, which many players didn’t look at because it was in too much depth.”

“There wasn’t enough focus on basic skills.”

“The hotel [Pennyhill Park in Bagshot, Surrey] is lovely but we are rugby players not hotel guests. The pitch is full of rabbit holes and cuts up too easily.”

“Every week we left at 5pm to hit rush-hour traffic. That’s not just a moan, that’s about players who have been lifting weights all day being stuck in a car, stiffening up.”

 

Displays at the Rugby World Cup

“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.”

“We got the French [quarter-final] week completely wrong. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday we trained in the morning and had the afternoon and evening off.

“X asked why we weren’t training at the same time as we were due to play in order to acclimatise but that was ignored.”

 

Coaching

“It reached a stage where each time we won a game we joked that we had saved a couple of the coaches’ jobs again.”

“The standard of attack coaching and defence coaching was poor. Substandard to coaching at my club.”

“The coaches seemed to have the same blueprint for every game. They didn’t seem to grasp that every opposition would play differently. Some of the coaches have no feel for the game.”

“The coaches’ philosophy on how to play the game was very different. The coaches really hate each other.”

“It was a tick-the-box, I’m all right Jack mentality.”

“Coaches spoke in generics: ‘play at tempo.’ But then no detail what to do next.”

“Coaches did not put enough trust in players on the field.”

“We had no identity. We weren’t the best at anything and we weren’t encouraged to be.”

“We basically did a bit of everything averagely, trying to cover everything in every training session.”

“They’d had four years to develop a plan and it felt like they were doing it off the cuff.”

“At our club there is a brutally honest policy. If you mess up, you are bollocked 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.”

“If players don’t perform, we get dropped; on the other hand, the coaches just seem to go through an internal review and keep their jobs.”

“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 Johno, it was that Johno was surrounded by the wrong people.”

“He’s incredibly loyal. The coaches aren’t stupid. They all make sure they get on very well with Johno.”

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

 

Graham Rowntree

“He was fantastic. Everyone likes and respects him and he had empathy with the players.”

“He was the best of all the coaches. He’s ahead of his time.”

 

Brian Smith

“He simply doesn’t understand the game well enough.”

“I would be delighted if he went. Our attack play was boring, uninventive, lacklustre, even schoolboy at times.”

“He didn’t offer anything. The players had all the ideas for strategy and all he did was write the players’ ideas on the board.”

“At one stage it was Ben Youngs who was coaching. Ben would come up with a strategy for how to run off the 9 and off the base of the ruck. Should he have had that responsibility when he’s playing in his first World Cup and trying to get his form back to where it was before his operation?”

“Smithy changes his mind all the time. In one preview he said we should scrum and maul them off the park, then in the review he said ‘why were you scrummaging them to death?’”

“He was way out of his depth.”

“We went away from what we did well. He selected an unexciting backline which likes to run over people.”

“If we’d got to the semi-finals or final it would have papered over the cracks and the worst thing is Brian Smith would have stayed in his job. It might be a blessing.”

 

John Wells

“Good at the technical side but pretty archaic.”

“He was out of his depth. There must be 20 coaches in the Premiership who would be better.”

 

Dave Alred

“We had kicking problems and yet almost every morning who do you see swanning around in a polo shirt about to play another round of golf but Alred. It’s not the image you should be giving off that this is like a holiday to you.”

“‘Ballgate’ was the worst incident in my mind because it was cheating.”

 

Selection

“For a 12-month period [summer 2010 until the end of the 2011 Six Nations] it was the best England had performed since the 2003 World Cup. That was in part due to continuity.”

“In the three World Cup warm-up games, they played three different teams. We lost the continuity.”

“We won the Six Nations and made huge strides against Australia, so why were so many changes made?”

“[Chris] Robshaw and [Tom] Wood proved themselves to be the fittest, the strongest and played out of their skin in training, but then they were overlooked for senior players and we reverted to type.”

“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.”

“Ben Youngs was rushed back from knee injury and wasn’t fit enough.”

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

“They went for the most experienced players who could win ugly. It seemed naive to stick to older heads.”

“They selected [Lewis] Moody ahead of [Tom] Wood despite Moodos being half-fit and Woody playing awesomely in training and in the Six Nations.”

“It seemed like they believed the press too much and selected players who dominated coverage but weren’t playing that well.”

“Doctors wrapped people in cotton wool. You soon found out that if you mentioned a niggle it could be your chance gone.”

“It was amazing how some players who couldn’t play due to an injury were doing backflips into the swimming pool and playing golf.”

 

Lewis Moody

“We didn’t really have a good captain. I think Johno liked [Lewis] Moody as he left the team talks to Johno. He wasn’t very good at team talks, just f***ed a lot.”

“Steve Borthwick was a phenomenal leader. He was so knowledgeable about the game that I’m sure he intimidated John Wells.”

“Rather than go for someone senior, they should go for a player who is guaranteed to start.”

“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.”

“There was a time when Lewis was going to address the squad and say it was unacceptable to behave the way they had done in Queenstown and get into the state Tindall did.

“But then X came in and said ‘I don’t see what the problem is with having a few drinks, the press are just against us and making a mountain out of a molehill’. Of course, as soon as a senior player had said that, other players agree. Moodos had lost the moment to be able to dictate to the squad.”

 

Discipline

“We set standards within the group but punctuality seemed to apply to the younger guys but not the senior players. For one team meeting X didn’t just arrive late, he missed the entire meeting yet no one says a word.”

“We had meetings where ‘values’ were discussed but they felt like empty words.”

“There was confusion from start to finish. Everything was grey. There was no black and white.”

“The environment was a bit too jokey and disrespectful. It was an immature squad who took the piss out of some players for working hard, talking to the coaches or having interests away from rugby.”

“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.”

“Too many players were chasing endorsements.”

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

“It was not a place where you felt you could be yourself or talk candidly. It was quite a dour, depressing set-up to be part of.”

 

Drinking

“We had three months together in camp not drinking and we didn’t have one social going out for some beers. And yet the night before we fly to New Zealand, the RFU lay on a farewell party.

“Why are we being given the clear message it’s OK to get p***ed when we’re about to fly to a World Cup. Then to be told there was a tab for us after the Argentina game seemed odd.”

“It was the senior guys pushing the boundaries, treating it like an old-school tour. It has to be treated more seriously.”

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

“I don’t think we understood the impact of Tinds being a member of the Royal Family in a Commonwealth country and the extra interest he would generate.”

“Ireland had been in there [the Altitude Bar in Queenstown] and were much worse, but I think they might have taken the press with them.”

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

“Drinking games are unacceptable on World Cup. Even if you’re given a free tab you should be able to show some self-restraint.”

“Drinking games are something that happen. It’s a part of how a group of lads relax.”

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

 

Media management

“We were constantly on the back foot with the media. An ‘us against the press’ mentality developed, which wasn’t healthy.”

“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.”

“The minute the night out hit the papers, the media department hit the panic button and we went into lockdown.”

“[Mike] Tindall got given terrible advice. I said they’re going to keep writing about it so at least tell them the truth, tell them your side.”

“Johno shouldn’t be spending most of his time taking questions about off-field incidents rather than rugby. Isn’t that what the media guy should do? Or what about Rob Andrew?”

“Ex-players started wading in when we know what they got up to in World Cups and it was worse than us.”

“A siege mentality developed. We need to be more professional in working with the press, not shutting them out.”

“I watched the coaches umming and ahhing for ages about whether to let Nick Mullins and Phil Vickery [the ITV commentators] watch training. The next day, the same commentators go to Wales and get made a cup of tea and welcomed in. Is it any wonder they feel like we treat them like s*** and do the same back to us?”

“The English press seemed to want us to mess up.”