Wane names the squad.



No Oledzki, Batchelor or Ackers. Instead he favours Cooper and Pearce-Paul, and probably Radley doing a spell at 9



Wow

Ackers allegedly has a small injury so probably explains that one. Can only assume the same for Oledski. Pearce-Paul is number 24 so well out of the line-up.



Batchelor is surely behind Whitehead, Radley and Knowles?

If Ackers and Oledski have slight knocks there’d no point risking them against Samoa as they will be needed later on in the tournament.



Be interesting to see who starts in the halves. Even though Welsby has squad number 6. Will he be used as a utility player (a place we have desperately lacked) as he’s class.

The Samoa squad is decent, could easily turn us over.

Think we could see Welsby on the bench would cover if the Williams/Sneyd partnership doesn't work out or if Tomkins knee plays up.

Not could, will easily turn England over

Need a good kicking game against Samoa to turn them around and make them do hard yards coming out of there own half.

Sounds like a good idea until you realise they have the likes of To'o, Tago, Crichton doing those hard yards.

Really looking forward to this. I'll be pleasantly surprised if we beat Samoa.

I hope we win,just to shut up the miserable buggers who do nothing but moan about the squad not being good enough.



Come on England

So Cooper , Hill and M. Mickey in , shows how bad we are plus a past his best Tomkins and never good enough Sneyd .



A gamble on proven nothing yet Kai Pearce - Paul and long time out of form one trick pony Williams .



so in my opinion we have the below who are good enough



Makinson

Watkins

Young

Farnworth

Welsby

Thompson

Whitehead

Radley

Knowles

Lees

Will be surprised if England win today.



Somoa have so much NRL quality.



Good that Ryan Hall isn't picked as his past it at this level.

Should be a decent game this. Hope the boys can do it. But Samoa look red hot on paper!!

How bad is Maclorum..

Pretty happy with the rest of the team.. Hill and Cooper need to be flawless not to be replaced.

Great work, guys!

Williams and Welsby excellent today with some great passing and short kicking plays. The whole back line is very well balanced and loaded with lots of smarts.



Our pack was massive in getting our halves on the front foot.

You could tell half their team had been on the grog for a fortnight , but you can only beat what is in front of you

His 2nd best prediction of the week after "I told you all weeks ago Wardle isn’t signing. Despite what jonh and his source down the pub says" the day before Wigan signed Wardle.

43k is a great crowd considering it was a against Samoa, only 2k less than 2013's opener but that was against Australia and also a double header with Wales involved.

Lots of locals there today and many at their first game of Rl who had not been to magic before but went because it was England

Hopefully that continues.



The good thing about the BBC showing every game is that we had RL stories on the homepage where you could see them rather than needing to be a high level hacker to find them.



If we can have a strong tournament it could be the shot in the arm the game needs.

I noticed that, lots of England rugby union shirts in the crowd, hopefully got lots of locals and first time fans engaged. The big win today will hopefully boost ticket sales for the rest of the tournament too.

Samoa's attitude and approach to the game was a disgrace. It was either a protest performance to show how unhappy they are with Matt Parish being their coach, or it was a thoroughly distasteful display of unprofessionalism. Are you telling me the likes of To'o and Luai would put in a performance as gutless as that for Penrith? I doubt it.



You could see a few of their players were shocked during the game. It seems like a group of their players at least were of the opinion they could just turn up and beat England.

Hey Aussie Troll you are Gus Gould "England can't beat Samoa" !! do you even care how stupid you continually look ?