Of the many ways that one could spend a Friday evening in Paris, competing in a third-place play-off would rank somewhere near the bottom, perhaps just above a night-time stumble into a particularly nasty section of the Seine. However much World Rugby dresses up what it insists on calling the bronze final, there is no escaping the fact that most players would, at this stage, rather be back at home with a bottle of beer, or enjoying some downtime with a verre de vin rouge in a Paris bistro.
“This is not the game you want to be playing in,” England assistant Richard Wigglesworth conceded this week. “You can be honest and say this isn’t the game that these two teams aimed to play in.
