Giants’ Jermaine McGillvary continued his impressive World Cup to help England cruise into the semi-finals with a 36-6 win over Papua New Guinea.
The Huddersfield winger touched down twice, taking his total to 11 tries in 10 appearances, and put his centre Kallum Watkins over for two others as Wayne Bennett’s men repeated the scoreline from their final group game against France a week earlier.
England were once more far from perfect but, after watching New Zealand slip up in their quarter-final, will be relieved to get through a bruising battle to set up a showdown with Tonga in Auckland next Saturday.
On McGillvary’s form, former Great Britain captain Paul Sculthorpe tweeted: “How good is Jerry!”
McGillvary has taken over from teammate Ryan Hall as the world’s best winger during a fantastic tournament in which he has scored six tries in four matches.
More than that, the explosive Huddersfield winger produced another series of relieving runs that took some of the workload off the forwards. England did survive a key early moment, however, when Papua New Guinea had a chance to open the scoring when centre Kato Ottio dropped the ball over the line.
Had he touched down, the score would have put an extra spring in the Kumuls’ step and England would have faced an even tougher battle to get on top.
Ratings: Gareth Widdop 6/10, Jermaine McGillvary 9, Kallum Watkins 8, John Bateman 5, Ryan Hall 6; Kevin Brown 6, Luke Gale 7, Chris Hill 6, Josh Hodgson 7, James Graham 8, Sam Burgess 8, Elliott Whitehead 7, Sean O’Loughlin 7.
Interchange: Alex Walmsley 8, Tom Burgess 6, Ben Currie, 6, James Roby 8.
Wayne Bennett concedes his side will need to improve if they are to go all the way in the World Cup.
The coach, who has admitted to having a resemblance to actor Clint Eastwood, described the quarter-final win as “the good, the bad and the ugly”.
Bennett remains impressed by his players’ attitude and performance in training but is worried over their poor completion rate.
“Of course, I’m concerned,” he said.
“Maybe we were just due for a below-average performance and this was the day, I hope.
“That was the good, the bad and the ugly. There was some really good defence and some nice build-up with some of their plays, the bad was the lack of discipline with the footy and it was ugly to watch.
“We wanted to be in Auckland next week and we’re there. We’ve done a lot of good things in this tournament so I think we can move on pretty quickly with this. I don’t think it’s something we’re going to carry into Auckland with us.
“We’re doing a lot of things right at training. If we had these problems at training, I think we’d have an issue. We’ve just got to carry it through to the game on a consistent basis.
“Their training attitude is great, they’re committed blokes, they train as good as anybody I’ve coached. We’ve just got to get the execution part.
“We’re doing a lot of things that will take us in that direction. We’re not getting further away from it, we’re getting closer to it. We need to put it right in the game.”
Bennett hailed McGillvary as world class.
“Everybody said I should put him in the team for the Four Nations last year and him and Ryan Hall were very good,” Bennett said. “He’s just got confident with the players.
“He’s been wonderful, growing in confidence and belief and starting to realise how good he can be.”
Papua New Guinea went into the game on the back of a three-match winning run but suffered an early blow when captain David Mead went off with a head knock.
Kumuls coach Michael Marum said: “We lost our leader early and missed him. But we didn’t give, we kept going right to the end.”
Former Leeds hooker James Segeyaro, who stood in for Mead at the post-match press conference, said: “Obviously we didn’t get the result we wanted.”
