Australia legends Paul Gallen and Cameron Smith are the latest to take aim at England following their underwhelming performance at Wembley in Saturday\u2019s Ashes opener: with Gallen dubbing the hosts \u2018horrible\u2019.<\/p>\n
Shaun Wane\u2019s side limped to a miserable 26-6 defeat against the Kangaroos in London, leaving them in must-win territory already going into Saturday\u2019s second Test at Everton.<\/p>\n
And the criticism about their performance has intensified in the days since defeat, with Gallen and Smith the next to comment.<\/p>\n
Former Kangaroos prop Gallen insisted he was shocked by how bad England were \u2013 before revealing that he now believes the gap between Super League and the NRL is getting bigger, not narrower<\/p>\n
\u201cEngland are going to have to get a whole lot better,\u201d Gallen said on Channel Nine.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t think Australia were great.. it was a very scrappy game, but England were horrible. One thing about the English side, they are always physical, they are always tough, particularly in the middle of the field and I thought they really lacked that.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t think they were physical at all. Their edge defence, forever and a day, even back when we played, was horrible and it was again last night. Angus Crichton carved up, the edges carved up. I thought I really saw last night the difference between the Super League and NRL.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think they\u2019re gaining on us at all, I think we\u2019re getting further away from them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gallen continued: \u201cI think we\u2019ll win the series comfortably. I reckon we could pick two or three Australian sides and go over there and still beat the Poms. They really struggled last night.\u201d<\/p>\n
Smith also admitted he was stunned by how limited England looked in attack \u2013 before joining the growing number of experts calling for AJ Brimson to be given a Test debut this weekend \u2013 insisting the Gold Coast star could realistically play in a number of positions.<\/p>\n
\u201cFullback or halves, their halves weren\u2019t much better either, they didn\u2019t offer too much in attack, they came up with a few good opportunities but failed to capitalise,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt took them 75 minutes to score points against this Australian outfit, they were a little bit off their game, they were scrappy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australia legends Paul Gallen and Cameron Smith are the latest to take aim at England following their underwhelming…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":244373,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[568],"tags":[64,63,761,762,158,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-244372","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nrl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-national-rugby-league","11":"tag-nationalrugbyleague","12":"tag-nrl","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}