Players take blame for Cup debacle

England's players have put the blame squarely on themselves for their failure in last autumn's World Cup. The strongly fancied national team was eliminated by New Zealand in the semi-finals, after losing heavily to them and Australia in the group stages and scraping a victory over Papua New Guinea.

Now a long-awaited review into what went wrong, partly based on interviews with the majority of the squad, has revealed that they hold themselves responsible for underperforming. "They were happy to talk and the thing that emerged most clearly was that they blamed themselves," said the RFL's executive chairman, Richard Lewis.

The players who volunteered their views to a specially hired consultant confirmed that there had been separate social groups on the tour – the much-discussed Leeds-Saints split – but denied it had affected their performances. but they did suggest that they should spend more time together – something that the League is to try to give them by setting up an Elite Training Squad, which will assemble for five days in the course of a season.

That is one of a series of measures aimed at putting a better prepared Test team on the field, but one change the RFL will not be making is to remove Tony Smith, who has already stood down as director of coaching, from his other job as England coach. Lewis denied Smith had been to blame for the debacle in Australia. "For me to be supportive of Tony is absolutely the right thing to do. He was absolutely the right man for the job."

Hull KR have suspended their full-back Ben Cockayne until 1 June or until he has completed his 240 hours of community service, following his conviction for assault last week. The club say that they gave "serious consideration" to sacking Cockayne.

Bradford will be without their captain, Paul Deacon, over the Easter programme after he underwent knee surgery. The Bulls have won their RFL tribunal to allow them to deregister Tame Tupou, on the grounds that the winger has been unfit to play or train.