Tomsey
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Defeat will haunt me for years: England star
Fullback Ben Foden reflects on his side's ignominious exit from the World Cup.
This defeat is going to haunt me for a long, long time. I will always remember this day and think to myself: ''If I had tried a bit harder, or done something a bit better then things might have turned out differently.'' But it was not to be.
It will be really tough to watch France play Wales in the World Cup semi-final on the television.
It should have been us playing Wales. It is one thing to be beaten by a better side, but France weren't a better side than us. We just didn't perform as we know we can.
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We are much better than that and that is what is so frustrating. We've worked hard for five months now just to throw it away on that game. I am absolutely livid. We had a massive opportunity and we blew it. I'm frustrated in our performance and my own personal performance.
The French were there for the taking and to go 16 points down by half-time, well, we were always going to struggle to get back from that. We will no doubt look at a few things over the next few days but we have all got to hold our hands up as a team and take responsibility.
I hope Martin Johnson stays on. You could see how disappointed he was, he looked as though he had played the game with us. You can't fault his passion and commitment.
There weren't many nerves in the changing room beforehand. Perhaps one of the problems was that we were overconfident as we had trained so well and were expecting a big performance.
We knew if we gave France a sniff then it would allow them to pick themselves up after the problems they have had, and that is exactly what happened. Both their tries were sloppy by us. For the first, I had to decide whether Ben Youngs had Vincent Clerc lined up. I should have hit him to finish off the tackle but I chose to hit his support runner. Clerc shrugged off the tackle and scored.
Desperation cost us their second try. You couldn't fault the commitment of the players but Ashy [Chris Ashton] and Manu [Tuilagi] were so desperate to make sure that Alexis Palisson wouldn't score in the corner, not knowing that I had him covered, and he was able to turn the ball inside for Maxime Medard.
The changing room was a horrible place to be afterwards. Hopefully we will remember the pain of this defeat and use it to inspire us, just as the 2003 side did when they won the World Cup four years after the quarter-final defeat by South Africa.
Telegraph, London
http://www.smh.com.au/rugby-union/r...ngland-star-20111009-1lfrz.html#ixzz1aNiAFRTo
This is some of the worst attitude I have ever seen. The fact that he thinks its alright to think things such as "It should have been us playing Wales. It is one thing to be beaten by a better side, but France weren't a better side than us." is disgusting, but then he has the audacity to write it in a newspaper. He then goes on to blame his team mates for all his defensive gaffs. This just proves that what rugby followers and journalists around the world where thinking when they watched the English players getting blind, abusing hotel staff, cheating on their wives and endangering their lives by jumping of boats, was correct: arrogant wankers.
You can't possibly expect a group of people with attitudes like that to be successful at anything... except maybe American Football...