In their own words: selected quotes from leaked reports

A range of quotes from the leaked report

PRE-SEASON

“Pre-season was a f**k-up. We’d have had a better chance of doing well at the World Cup if we had been allowed to train at our club.”

“The Hotel (Pennyhill Park in Bagshot, Surrey) is lovely, but we are rugby players, not guests. The pitch is full of rabbit holes and cuts up too easily.”

PERFORMANCE AT THE WORLD CUP

“I really can’t believe we lasted as long as we did in the tournament. We played like crap.”

“We got the French week completely wrong. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday we trained in the morning and had the afternoon and evening off. X asked why we weren’t training at the same time as we were due to play in order to acclimatise, but that was ignored.”

COACHING

“It reached the stage where each time we won a game, we joked that we had saved a couple of the coaches’ jobs again.”

“Some of the coaches have no feel for the game.”

“The coaches’ philosophy on how to play the game was very different. The coaches really hate each other.”

“It was a tick-the-box, ‘I’m all right’ mentality. They had four years to develop a plan and it looked like they were doing it off the cuff.”

MARTIN JOHNSON (Team manager)

“It wasn’t Johnno, it was that Johnno was surrounded by the wrong people. He’s incredibly loyal. The coaches aren’t stupid. They all make sure they get on very well with Johnno.”

“We just wanted Johnno to have the bollox to take action, especially after the Tindall night. He was too loyal and that was his downfall.”

BRIAN SMITH (Backs coach)

“He simply doesn’t understand the game well enough. I would be delighted if he went. Our attack play was boring, uninventive, lacklustre and even schoolboy at times.”

“He didn’t offer anything. The players had all the ideas for strategy and all he did was write the player’s ideas on the board.”

“At one stage it was Ben Youngs who was coaching. Ben would come up with a strategy of how to run off the nine and off the base of the ruck. Should he have that responsibility when he’s playing in his first World Cup and trying to get his form back to where it was before the operation?”

“He selected an unexciting backline that likes to run over people.”

DAVE ALRED (Kicking coach)

“We had kicking problems, yet almost every morning who do you see swanning around in a polo shirt about to play another round of golf? It’s not the image that you should be giving off, that this is like a holiday to you.”

“Ballgate (when England illegally switched balls mid-match) was the worst incident in my mind because it was cheating.”

SELECTION

“Jonny Wilkinson is not an attacking threat anymore. We really needed (Toby) Flood, because he is the one who bosses the team. Floody was the reason England played well in the Six Nations.”

“(Chris) Robshaw and (Tom) Wood proved themselves to be the fittest, the strongest and played out of their skin in training, but then they were overlooked for senior players and we reverted to type.”

“It was amazing how some players who couldn’t play due to an injury were doing back flips into the swimming pool and playing golf.”

THE CAPTAINCY

“We didn’t really have a good captain. I think Johnno liked (Lewis) Moody as he left the team talks to Johnno. He wasn’t very good at team talks, just f**ked a lot.”

DISCIPLINE

“There was a time when Lewis was going to address the squad and say it was unacceptable to behave the way they had done in Queenstown and get into the state Tindall did. But then X came in and said ‘I don’t see what the problem is with having a few drinks, the press are just against us and making a mountain out of a molehill’. Of course as soon as a senior player had said that, other players agree, Moodos (Moody) has lost the moment to be able to dictate to the squad.”

“We set standards within the group, but punctuality seemed to play to the younger guys but not the senior players. For one team meeting X didn’t just arrive late, he missed the entire meeting, yet no one says a word.”

“To hear one senior player in the changing room say straight after the quarter-final defeat ‘there’s £35k just gone down the toilet’ made me feel sick. Money shouldn’t even come into a player’s mind. Too many players were chasing endorsements.”

DRINKING

“We had three months together in camp not drinking and we didn’t have one, social ‘going out for some beers’. And yet the night we fly to New Zealand the RFU lay on a farewell party. Why are we being given the clear message it’s okay to get pissed, when we are about to fly to a World Cup?”

“If it’s the senior players leading the drinking until they can’t remember anything, what example are the younger players set?”

“Ireland had been there (the Altitude Bar in Queenstown) and were much worse, but I think they might have taken the press with them.”

“It’s our fault we came back so unpopular.”

MIKE FORD (Defence coach)

“His analysis was like a white wall of jargon. Half the time he had no idea what he was talking about.”

“Defensive drills and lineout calls were two, three years behind.”

“It was like banging your head against a brick wall. He was full of pointless stats.”