League: Kiwis prepare for England after easy start

Lance Hohaia says his body doesn't feel it had an easy game against Samoa. Photo / Getty Images

Despite being battered, bruised and, in the case of captain Adrian Morley, broken beyond repair, England believe they learned the more valuable lessons from Saturday night's Mt Smart warm-up tests.

The tourists will be schooling up big time before Saturday night's Four Nations showdown with the Kiwis in Wellington, with the classes to focus on why they faded so badly against a Maori side that had barely dented them for the first 50 minutes of their Southern Hemisphere tour opener.

But whether that emergency cramming will be enough to see them foot it with a Kiwis side that sucked up 10 minutes of pain and then dished out 70 minutes of torment to a poor Samoan side, remains to be seen.

The Kiwis were as clinical and unyielding in their 50-6 drubbing of the Samoans as the English were frail in coughing up an 18-point lead to draw with the Maori.

"We've got an extremely tough game under our belts that will put us in good stead for [this] week," said coach Steve McNamara, who was upbeat despite some grim tidings on the injury front.

The draw with the Maori had been a much more valuable exercise than the high-scoring warm-up victories of previous years, he said.

"We've played Wales and France and put 60 or 70 points on them and it does us no good whatsoever. This was exactly what we were looking for, without the injuries, obviously."

McNamara was keen not to lean too heavily on the ready-made excuses of jetlag and the fact that his side had expected to use a full squad of 24 players only to be limited to 17 at the 11th hour.

With two of those players, Morley and Sam Tomkins, crying off early, the English were limited to a two-man interchange for much of the match.

That explains some, but not all, of their second-half lethargy.

"There was a bit of us not being good enough as well," McNamara said. "We played some dumb rugby league. We weren't great under pressure in the second half.

"It gives us a whole lot of things to work on. If we'd have gone out there and won by 30 or 40 points we don't get a chance to learn from that."

The scale of England's collapse was magnified by the excellence of their beginning. For 50 minutes they bossed the Maori in every capacity.

Defensively they were rock solid, while on attack the pack made good ground and produced enough quality offloads for lively halfbacks Tomkins and Luke Robinson to prosper.

"We were really good first half," McNamara said. "We had our legs there, we had some energy there."

His hypothesis would suggest the Kiwis will have learned little from dismantling Samoa with such ease.

Fullback Lance Hohaia disagreed. "My body doesn't feel like it was an easy game," he said.

The meaty hits delivered by the Samoans throughout would have accounted for that, but Samoa lacked the discipline - and in some cases fitness - to challenge for 80 minutes.

Even when the Samoans were briefly at a high ebb there were positive signs for the Kiwis, whose right side contributed four unconverted first half tries before the left-edge attack spearheaded by Manu Vatuvei completed the demolition in the second half.

"[Coach] Steve [Kearney] spoke about our defensive structure being our benchmark during the week and the boys bought into that really well," Hohaia said.

"It is hard to shut down every offload but I thought we did well. "[This] week it is going to be another step up so I guess it is up to us to step the level up a bit."

McNamara, too, knows the intensity will go up several notches in Wellington, saying his team would have to be a "whole lot better".