England being hamstrung by anxiety, admits worried Flood

Fly-half joins chorus of dissatisfaction while attack coach promises below-par players will be 'sorted'

There is nothing like a World Cup to maximise the tension within a squad, especially a squad uneasy with itself. Brian Smith, the England attack coach, did his level best yesterday to paper over any cracks that might be appearing in the red rose party – "We're not the kind of group where fingers are pointed in public," insisted the Australian – but Toby Flood, by some distance the team's best player in the deeply flawed performance against Georgia at the weekend, had no hesitation in joining the likes of James Haskell and Ben Youngs in expressing his dissatisfaction with some of the things that are going on.

"We're pleased with bits of our game and frustrated with massive parts of it," the outside-half admitted with customary frankness. "We said beforehand that we wouldn't do X and Y, then did it. We're causing ourselves a lot of strife and we have to accept that to get where we want to be, we have to raise our game massively. I see it as a personal ownership thing: the problems are more down to individual decision-making than to anything structural, like the line-out malfunctioning or the scrum going backwards or people not being able to catch. Instead of sticking to our plan for 20, 30, 40 minutes, we're not sticking to it at all."

This theme has been running through England's performances at Test level for many a long month, as Flood openly acknowledged. "Tell me about it," he said. "It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the week leading into the Georgia game we stressed the importance of trusting our defensive system, of saying: 'There's no reason to rush anything because we'll get the ball back at some point.' Yet we didn't follow through on that and as a result, we found ourselves 11-2 down on the penalty count in the first half. It didn't have to happen that way, but we let anxiety and frustration get the better of us.

"I'd like to think this will do us a favour, that a kick up the arse will be good for us. We need to be more savvy and more pragmatic, because if the Georgian guy had kicked his goals it would have been a different game. I can't speak for other players in terms of how they approached the game but I hope none of us went into it looking to get the job done quickly. I don't believe anyone did. I just think we're being a little naive at the moment."

Smith pronounced himself pleased with aspects of England's attacking game against the eastern Europeans and agreed that Flood, in particular, had performed strongly. However, he also conceded that parts of the performance were way below-par. "There was frustration at the way we started the game and frustration with the way we ended it," he remarked, "but somewhere in the middle there was some decent rugby played. We'll go through it carefully. Certainly, we won't brush anything under the carpet: some guys will get sorted during the course of our team meetings, others will get sorted one-on-one. What we won't do is sort them in public."

The fact that Flood contributed so significantly, both in setting his back division moving with bold distribution from deep positions and in kicking intelligently from hand, has not made the lives of Smith and his fellow coaches any easier. Do they revert to the infinitely more conservative Jonny Wilkinson for the big matches ahead – Scotland in Auckland on Saturday week, for instance – or do they play a bolder hand by backing the younger man's more adventurous approach? Smith reminded his audience that two high-calibre No 10s are better than one, but there are times when being spoiled for choice spoils everything.

As things stand, the selectors seem undecided as to who should run the show at the business end of this tournament, always assuming England reach that point, and appear some way short of committing themselves to any particular combination at centre. It is a rum state of affairs, given the amount of time they have been working on this World Cup project. Critics would say they reached "make your mind up time" long ago, but fudged the issue.

Martin Johnson, the England manager, has called in Thomas Waldrom, the New Zealand-born No 8 from Leicester, as cover for Nick Easter, who is suffering from the back problems that prevented him confronting Georgia on Sunday.

Waldrom, named in the original 45-man World Cup training squad but chopped in the first cull, is not an official replacement: should Easter recover over the next 48 hours or so, he may fly straight back home. Johnson has yet to name a replacement for the loose-head prop Andrew Sheridan, who withdrew from the tournament last week with a shoulder injury.