‘They know they were lucky, but they won’

THIS IS about as hard as it gets in rugby, when you get knocked out of a World Cup despite feeling that you should have won all four of your games, despite feeling that you were the better side, not just against England in Auckland, but also last week, against Argentina in Wellington, where all the damage was done, then it’s the most bitter of bitter pills.

It’s an indescribably awful feeling and I was very emotional at the end. There’s no way we should be heading home. No way. But we are and that’s it. It’s very, very hard to accept.

It’s difficult to even talk about it to be honest. Afterwards, we tried to console each other but it doesn’t do any good. I was talking to some of the English boys afterwards and I told them that we didn’t mess up against them, we messed up against Argentina. I told them we were better than both of them and they didn’t seem to disagree.

I was chatting to Tom Croft and I think Tom was hating life out there against us. We were causing havoc for large parts of the game and it was a bit of a nightmare for them. I think they know they were lucky, but they won, so what do they care, right? Tom Palmer told me that their lads hate it when we play with that high intensity. Courtney Lawes said he felt like he could never get in the game at all, that he was chasing shadows.

My wife, Leann, my dad and my uncle were at the game and that made it even more emotional at the end. People were asking me afterwards about whether I was now going to retire from international rugby.

Was that my last game? I don’t know. I have to go away and re-evaluate. I need time to think. I’m not prepared to make any rash decisions after a bitter loss. There’s no benefit in that to anybody. I’m trying to make sense of all this. Why has this happened? We make a break and we don’t convert. There were a couple of times in this game against England when we should have scored but we didn’t. There was just a few seconds’ lapse in concentration and the chance goes. It’s little things that add up to big things that mean we’ve lost two games out of four and we’ve not scored a try in three games out of four.

I’ll have an awful lot of regrets after this World Cup. We all will.

I know there was a lot of chat about us not dealing with the restart after Mossie had put us 12-3 in the lead. Some of the boys were saying it was a bit like Argentina all over again. I didn’t see the missed restart and I’m not sure if I want to see it. What’s done is done.

When I came on to the field, Jonny Wilkinson had just made it 12-9, but the lads were in good heart, they were confident and they were focused. We came close to scoring a try when Parksy hit that crossfield and Tom Croft and Richie Gray got into a race for the ball. Crofty did well there, in fairness to the guy.

Even when Chris Ashton scored their try we got together behind the posts and said, OK, they’ve scored and they’re ahead and maybe qualification was looking dodgy but we still wanted to win the match. In our heart of hearts we probably didn’t think we were going to go and score all the points we needed but we were desperate to win the game.

We didn’t even get that consolation, not that it would have meant a whole lot I guess. Sport can be cruel. You only had to look around our dressing room last night to realise that. A horrible night and a head-wrecking World Cup. To a man, we all feel sick.