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PARIS - England coach Brian Ashton surveyed the wreckage of England's worst-ever World Cup defeat on Friday and pronounced an improvement on last week's win over the United States.
While England fans streamed away from the Stade de France barely able to believe that they had just seen
the world champions crushed 36-0 by South Africa to leave their defence hanging by a thread, Ashton somehow found something positive from the mauling.
"I don't agree with you, I think you are miles off the mark there," Ashton said when it was suggested that there had been no improvement on last week's 28-10 win over the largely amateur American team.
"The whole context was different and in some areas we played better than we did last week. If we had played South Africa like we played last week they would have scored 80 points.
"This was a much stronger side than the one we played against last week. While we didn't play particularly well in the first half I thought we showed some resilience in the second half and some individuals stepped up to the mark.
"I don't think we helped ourselves in the first part of the game and once we got to halftime it was obviously going to be very difficult against a side playing as well as that."
Despite Ashton's defence, the statistics tell a damning tale.
It was the first time England failed to score a point since a weakened team lost 18-0 to South Africa nine years ago and was their worst margin of defeat in a World Cup - surpassing the 44-21 loss, also to the Springboks, on the same Stade de France pitch in the 1999 quarter-finals.
They join a list of shame as the fifth team in World Cup history to post a nil after Ivory Coast (1995), Canada (1995), Spain (1999) and Namibia (2003).
No previous holder has come close to taking such a thrashing in the pool stage and England now need to beat Samoa next week to avoid the ultimate humiliation of failing to reach the quarter-finals for the first time.
Stand-in captain Martin Corry said: "We are a bit shell-shocked but the most important thing is that we dust ourselves down, give ourselves 24 hours and start thinking about Samoa.
"We went in thinking and expecting we could win. That wasn't the case but we will go into next week with exactly the same mindset.
Ashton will be forced into more changes for next week after serious-looking injuries for fullback Jason Robinson (hamstring) and centre Jamie Noon (knee ligaments) look sure to rule them out, probably for the remainder of the tournament.
- REUTERS
