England were comfortably second best at Twickenham as Fiji blew Steve Borthwick's side away in the second half
England could point to a batch of banned and injured star players sitting in the stands – but the likes of Owen Farrell, Billy Vunipola and Jamie George gazed down from the top tier of the stands on a whole load of chickens coming home to roost.
The panicked decision to sack Eddie Jones as head coach last December has been followed so far by the inability so far of Borthwick and his hastily assembled team of assistants to put it all right. Now there are just two weeks to go to England’s World Cup opener against Argentina in Marseille, and it feels a slim and shaky hope that some returning big guns will inspire a positive performance.
England’s backs did at least produce some tries at last here, in the fourth match of a mostly desperate warm-up summer series – Jonny May, Marcus Smith and Joe Marchant were the scorers. But Borthwick knows the mountainous scale of the challenge to rescue a game plan and confidence out of this latest embarrassment on the same hallowed ground where they beaten by a record score by France in March.
England led 8-3 at half-time but were trailing 23-22 after Marchant ran in his try on 67 minutes, and the cosy old idea of Fijians meekly folding in the closing stages was not the script being written on this dramatic day. The jinking Ravutaumada set up the replacement scrum-half Simione Kuruvoli for Fiji’s third and decisive try.
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