England captain Sam Tomkins declared ‘that’s not the England we should be’ after the heart-breaking golden point defeat to Samoa.
Stephen Crichton’s extra-time drop goal gave the Pacific Island nation a historic 27-26 win at the Emirates Stadium, to send England packing at the semi-final stage on home soil again.
And speaking after the game, Tomkins had no excuses for the defeat against a team they beat 60-6 just four weeks ago.
“We were the second-best team,” said Tomkins “There was plenty of effort, but effort alone isn’t enough and we saw that tonight.
“The amount of pressure we put ourselves under by coming up with some sloppy errors in attack and defence. I’m really disappointed because we undersold ourselves massively tonight.
“That’s not the England team we should be tonight. We have shown in previous weeks what we can do, but tonight we didn’t execute anything we had practiced.”
Tomkins also admitted that England gave up easy tries after going into half-time behind as Samoa capitalised on some average defence on right edge of Shaun Wane’s side.
“In the first half we were winning the territory battle but they struck us with two tries which I didn’t feel like they deserved,” Tomkins added.
“But they are a good side, they have a lot of good players, and give them the opportunity. If you give them as much as what we did, they were always going to punish us, and they did that.”