Wigan Warriors ace in bullish mood ahead of England's clash with France - 'hard-nosed'

Eng­land hooker Brad O’Neill says his side will res­ist the urge to go for broke when they face France in their second World Cup match in Perth on Sat­urday.

An open­ing 30-12 loss to Tonga has left their hopes of reach­ing the semi-finals hanging by a thread, with points dif­fer­ence look­ing increas­ingly like the only way they may pro­gress.

But head coach Brian McDer­mott has named an unchanged 19-man squad in a sign that he does not plan rad­ical changes against a France team smart­ing from a 78-4 hum­bling by Samoa last Fri­day.

O’Neill, the newly-crowned Super League Man of Steel, said: “We have dis­cussed what is required but I feel like the men­tal­ity can’t be any dif­fer­ent to what we had against Tonga.

“We can’t go into this game think­ing about the points dif­fer­ence. We’ve got to go into this game hard-nosed like we did against Tonga, and hope­fully if we do our jobs well enough we’re going to get the win.”

A com­plic­ated cross-group format has left Eng­land need­ing Tonga to beat Samoa in their final group game in a fort­night’s time to stand any chance of reach­ing the last four – provid­ing all the other games go to form.

That would take the final semi-final slot down to points dif­fer­ence between Eng­land and Samoa – and McDer­mott’s men are already up against it given Samoa’s stun­ning win over the Super League-laden French side.

“We’re not chan­ging any­thing about the way we play,” O’Neill added. “It’s more about work­ing on the exe­cu­tion side of things that we didn’t do so well against Tonga. As you’d expect, Sat­urday was very dis­ap­point­ing, but there is still a real belief in this team.”