Revealed: What caused England and Tonga kick-off delay

Thanks to tries from Wigan Warriors and Warrington Wolves centre Toby King, Hull KR halfback Mikey Lewis and a brace of tries for Tom Johnstone, England claimed a 22-18 win over Tonga to begin the Test Series.

However, the opening game of this historic Test Series was delayed from the original 14:30 kick off time.

Many may wonder why the game was delayed. This was due to an issue with ticket scanners with fans delayed in arriving at the stadium.

A crowd of nearly 13,000 fans attended the game which also served as the return of St Helens legend Kristian Woolf a year on from delivering St Helens’ fourth consecutive title.

However, this time his side came up short Shaun Wane’s men who reflected on the game after the match.

He said: “Yeah, really good. Not perfect, but I thought it was a really good performance. I thought we did well in patches. Considering we’ve only trained together twice and we have a young half-back partnership then yeah, I’m happy. We’ve won a Test match.”

Asked if he expected it to be so competitive, Wane said: “Yeah, they’re a good team, there’s a lot of NRL players like we have and so they’re big athletes, they’re far bigger team than what we are.

“I do honestly know, not think, I know that we can improve massively on that. We did some good things but it just wasn’t for long enough periods yet.”

He was pleased with the improvement in the second half:

“There was spells, especially in that second half, where we went set for set. I just think the longer we stay in that the better. I thought we’d come into our own.

“It’s when we started trying to give a few penalties away and went against what we’re about. But we fixed it at half time and I thought second half we were a lot better.”