England coach Brian McDermott blamed a lack of flow during the second half against PNG on Friday night as the reason his side failed to win by a big margin.
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England started the game with a points differential 68 points worse than Samoa and needed to win by at least 50 to give themselves a chance of progressing to the semi-finals with the hope that Tonga would then beat the Samoans on Sunday.
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After leading 22-0 after 20 minutes in Wollongong on Friday night it was all going to plan for England.
Then came a disastrous 50 minutes where they failed to score a point with the Kumuls putting two tries of their own on.
The final score of 34-12 felt like a loss for England, who now have to hope Tonga beats Samoa by 47 points or more for them to progress.
It’s looking like it will be the first time the English have failed to reach the semi-final stages of a World Cup.
“It looks like we’re going out of the tournament with that scoreline there,” McDermott said.
The England coach had to sit and watch as his men completed at just 60 per cent as they tried desperately to rack up the points in the second period.
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And he blamed the stop-start nature of the match for his side’s lack of scoring.
“That second half got scrappy and there was no flow in the game. The game lost its flow after about 25 minutes,” he said.
“I don’t think it was anything to do with what we were doing. There was just no flow and we should have handled that a lot better.”
McDermott admitted his players played too frantic in pursuit of points.
“It was a really difficult situation to find ourselves in during the second half. If all we needed to do was win the game we would have handled the nature of the second half a lot better…but we had to score 60 points,” he said.
“That was the narrative, and it has been the narrative for two weeks.
“Again, there was no flow to the second half, and that wasn’t because we tried to play without flow. It’s just the nature of the game.”
England captain George Williams got a ray of hope from Tonga coach Kristian Woolf prior to the game, saying his side was hell-bent on beating their Pacific rivals on Sunday.
But even Williams sat in a state of despair in the post-match press conference knowing he’ll likely be on a flight home on Monday.
“He (Woolf) texted me today saying that they’re going to try and win for us. It’s a big task though,” Williams said.
“We lost the first game and that fractured our chances straight away.”
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McDermott got a message off rival coach Jason Demetriou at halftime, even if it was unintended.
“I could hear Jason screaming from the dressing room there and giving them a blast, and they came out and played very physically,” McDermott said.
“I think some of the messages coming down from me at some point was to stop chasing points now. Let’s just treat this like a Test match, which is a hard message to send down when you know you’ve got to win by such a margin.”
Despite what looks like an early World Cup exit, the off-contract England coach wants to lead the team to the next tournament in four years’ time.
“I’d like to do the job and have a four-year plan in place for the next World Cup, which is how it should be,” he said.
“I’m really excited about that because if we can do what we’ve done over the last three weeks, if we can put that into a plan for the next four years and have a proper strategic plan building up to the next World Cup, that would be good.”