France 10-30 England: Shaun Wane says his side 'will get better'

Head coach Shaun Wane says England "will get better" after his side claimed a hard-fought win over France.

The 30-10 triumph in Perpignan gave Wane his first victory as boss since taking over from Wayne Bennett.

"We did some good stuff, there will be lots of lessons we can learn and improve on," Wane told BBC Sport.

The fixture was contested on the day that should have seen England play Samoa in the opening game of the World Cup, but the event has been postponed.

England's Ashes series against Australia last Autumn was also cancelled because of the pandemic so this was their first victory since beating New Zealand in November 2018.

The disruption means England play only three more matches before the delayed World Cup gets under way next year.

Wane said: "We will need to improve for games against New Zealand and Australia. I thought there were some good individual performances but I will always look to try and improve us.

"The lads have done really well today considering it has been a tough day's travel and we have had three sessions on the field as a team."

'It's going to be a tough review'

Wane handed debuts to eight players while Wigan's John Bateman was given the captaincy in place of injured Man of Steel Sam Tomkins.

The much-changed team started off superbly by racing into a 20-0 lead after 20 minutes, and although France hit back in the second half, England finished it off with two late tries from Tommy Makinson and Bateman.

Former Leeds Rhinos and England forward Jamie-Jones Buchanan said on BBC One: "It's going to be a tough review, the execution and skill started really well, but my question was 'have they got the discipline to persevere with ruthlessness?'

"No, they failed to score some easy tries. We won the game because we have better players."

Former England forward Jon Wilkin said: "When you are 20-0 up you want to come out in the second half and nail 10 minutes, be ruthless for 10 minutes, but they did the opposite of that and started in such a poor way."

Wane added: "Very simply, the first 20 we made no errors, no penalties and we won 20-0. The second one we made about eight errors, so that is it.

"The more we get through our sets and get in the grind and throw real good shapes at them, the more we can trouble them. But we just didn't do it enough - I understand, we've not been together that long but we will get better.

"We bombed three or four tries, again we will improve on that. If somebody gave me that scoreline on the way over on the plane this morning, I would have been happy with that."