Foley scored 28 of his side’s points and while the Aussies can now focus on the quarter-finals, Lancaster and a few of his under-achieving and over-hyped players are heading towards the dole queue.
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They’ve also been hammered by injuries, but keen to ward off any faint sniff of complacency in his camp, Cheika will turn to his mind game handbook and paint Wales this week as a tight, cornered unit led by a “master coach” in Gatland.
That game will now be England’s last Pool A match, a “meaningless” fixture against minnows Uruguay in Man-chester this Saturday.
But Gatland suggested Lancaster had been the victim of a premature draw.
He knows the end is nigh, but more heads should roll.
Ritchie was adamant that change did not include a relaxation in England’s policy of selecting only home-based players for Test duty.
Matt Giteau, who plays for Toulon alongside England outcast Steffon Armitage, is still allowed to turn out for the Aussies and it was the mercurial centre who hammered the final nail in the host’s coffin by scoring a wonderful try to complete his side’s rout.
The future of head coach Stuart Lancaster and his assistants Andy Farrell, Graham Rowntree and Mike Catt are in grave doubt and the inquest will begin once the World Cup is over, although Ritchie refuses to outline a timescale or format for the review.
“The foundations are still very strong but clearly we weren’t ready to win and get out of this pool”.
Hodgson, of course, knows what Lancaster is going through having overseen a similar tale of woe with our national football team in Brazil in 2014.
But, just as England will be missing from the knockout stages, so their writers are missing the point – that Stuart Lancaster’s team were poorly selected, had poor tactics, were smashed in the scrum, and couldn’t function under pressure. Fly-half Bernard Foley’s 28-point haul was the highest by an Australian against England.
Lancaster admitted he will consider his future after watching four years of hard work go up in smoke, but Woodward wants the recriminations to wait until after the tournament is over.
Let’s be honest, they can’t do much worse can they? “The atmosphere was outrageously loud, that’s not an easy thing to deal with”, Wallabies coach Michael Cheika said. But we lost two games, crucial games, and that’s how we’ll be judged. That’s what we’ll be judged on and I understand that.
“That’ll be the overriding emotion I’ll have for a long time I think”.
What happened after that victory is what Cheika and his team have seared into their memories to serve as a reminder to not get ahead of themselves. They have quite a number of caps. “It wasn’t ideal and it’s just another step along the way but the commitment was very good and we’ll be looking for more of that going forward”.
“It is right for them to do that”. We apologize to them.
“It’s important that the country stays behind them”.
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“They play an expansive game off good ball from the forwards and I am expecting both teams to throw the ball around and really use the combinations both teams have in their back-lines”.
