England v Australia: Tom Wood insists England have the quality to compete with the best
Friday 28 November 2014 23:03, UK
Flanker Tom Wood insists England are geared up to end their autumn campaign on a high against Australia at Twickenham on Saturday.
England suffered three-point defeats to world champions New Zealand and South Africa earlier in November but having gone some way to atoning by beating Samoa 28-9 last weekend, Wood is confident of outgunning the Wallabies.
He said: "We had a huddle immediately after South Africa when the result went against us and that's when we battened down the hatches a little bit.
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"We said, 'we're going to come in for some flack here, the fingers are going to be pointed at individuals, scrutiny's going to go up, everything's going to be related to the World Cup, so let's pull tight and look inwards'.
"The job for pundits and so-called experts is to sensationalise everything and build everything up and ask, 'what does it all mean?'
"For us it's the opposite. It's to level out all the peaks and troughs. If we win by three points we don't get ahead of ourselves, we just keep working.
"If we lose by three, it's not the end of the world, we don't all go on suicide watch. We just pull tighter and work on the things we need to work on.
"We don't feel we're a million miles away. We do have to improve in certain areas, of course we do. But we haven't become bad players overnight.
"The team that played in the Six Nations (that) everyone was so excited about hasn't disappeared. We've come in for a lot of criticism and a lot of things have been questioned.
"If we've underperformed so gravely yet have only lost by three points to the two top teams, then it'll be interesting to see what happens when we get it right."
Watch England v Australia, Saturday 1.30pm, Sky Sports 2
