Eddie Jones delays naming England team to play Fiji until Friday

Semesa Rokoduguni, Jonathan Joseph and Joe Launchbury grabbed a brace each as England racked up nine tries in a 58-15 demolition of Fiji at Twickenham.

Rokoduguni, the form winger in the Premiership this season for Bath, replaces Marland Yarde on the right wing with Goode, last season’s Premiership player of the year, making his first start under Jones, ahead of Mike Brown.

“This was a conservation I had with Fiji back in May-June”, the chief executive said. He admitted: “It was an emotional day for me playing against Fiji, I didn’t need tears to show my emotion, everything was on the inside more than the outside”.

Fiji coach John McKee was impressed by England’s performance, but the Kiwi refused to be drawn on whether he believes they are good enough to dethrone New Zealand.

Jones himself was delighted with his winger’s performance, praising the mental resolve to perform at such a high level after two years away from worldwide rugby.

Jones said that serving soldier Rokoduguni predicted before the game that he would score two tries against the country of his birth and he delivered on his promise. The World Cup in Japan is going to be really hard. you need players to be robust and flexible.

England raced into a 31-0 lead after just 27 minutes, then hit the buffers before stretching their legs again for an 11th win in a row under Aussie Jones.

England now sit second in the world rankings with their latest victory a 58-15 win over Fiji at Twickenham. “I don’t think we’ve achieved anything [but] we’ve got a group of players who are committed to be the No1 team in the world”. You get more information or less information, good information or bad information. But that is the next step of a team going forward – that is what we want to achieve.

“These awards and nominations make us all very proud to be Fijian and doubly proud to have been given the opportunity to represent our nation – a nation that has never been able to compete on rugby’s finance sheet, but can at least strive to be competitive on rugby’s great fields”. My experience with Tongan players is that they love playing and they want to play. We are just getting out of the shallow end and now we start jumping into the deep end.

“We’re only 11 games into what we’re trying to do here”. We haven’t done that. “I’m a coach, I coach England and I’m only anxious about England”, he said.

“You take it and you have got to give it back”. And that’s the exciting thing for us. Technically we could have requested the release of our players but we took the decision that any players who were involved in the finals we would not select in fairness to the players – that was the best pathway to go.