France beats England 25-20 in Rugby World Cup warmup

Watson displayed his razor sharp finishing skills in scoring two first-half tries, and with May dotting down for England’s third score, the 22-year-old Nowell will have to produce something special in Paris to force his way into the starting XV for England’s opening World Cup match against Fiji on September 18.

They pushed England pretty close in the last match, and with a little more care in risky areas, they could have possibly stolen a victory. “No matter what number he has on his back he can play different positions in the same game and make an impact”.

Haskell will be keen to prove his critics wrong as he takes his position in England’s back-row against France on Saturday. “We let ourselves down”.

The set-piece was once again exposed, with referee Jaco Peyper repeatedly penalising the scrum, while the throwing of Tom Youngs and replacement hooker Jamie George contributed to the mess at the line-out.

They are looking to reproduce the sort of high-octane game which brought 18 tries in the Six Nations, and after a punishing programme built around MAS running – where players are worked at the limits of their aerobic capacity – their frontline pack will have the chance to show how their athleticism has developed.

Lancaster admitted the pitch “wasn’t ideal” but was impressed with the performance of the bench who gave the side some impetus.

“They are used to playing together and I expect them to get the team playing just as well as Morgan (Parra) and Francois (Trinh Duc) did last week”, said Sant-Andre. Game load and workload are totally out of proportion with what it should be and yet every year when we raise this with World Rugby, the self-interest around the Tier One unions means that no viable solutions are found. The career span for players goes down and when you’ve got leading players like Ben, Corbs and all the player associations talking about it and nothing happens, it’s galling. We just weren’t good enough in that first half and there’s no excuse for that.

For assistant coach Andy Farrell, he hopes England will learn from their mistakes and come out of their Paris loss a better side.

“France deserved to win and played very well in the first half”.

Burrell’s first involvement was to concede a penalty for not rolling away and Scott Spedding landed the three points from inside his own half.

“Once we sorted that out, we are a threat against anyone as our attack is hard to handle”.

“Then you have the World Cup looming in the background and places up for competition”. And we won the game.