Ryan Lonergan has jumped to the defence of Joseph Suaalii after he received plenty of criticism following the Wallabies’ 45-22 loss against England at Allianz Stadium, Twickenham, on Sunday.

Former England flyer Chris Ashton was amongst former rugby league star Suaalii’s biggest critics and told the BBC in his post-match analysis of the Nations Championship encounter that the code hopper “doesn’t look like an international rugby union player.”

Lonergan did not agree with that assessment, however, and defended Suaalii, who featured on the left wing for Australia, and his other backline team-mates.

‘Great athlete’

“I think he’s a great team-mate, great athlete, and I think he played pretty well on the weekend with the opportunities that we gave him as a team, which weren’t many,” the scrum-half told reporters.

“I thought he was good in the air and he put himself in a position around the park to be able to attack when we could but I think as a team, we just didn’t give the strike power that we have opportunity through our inaccuracies, through our launch and then just our speed of movement was down.

“When you look at the back three we’ve got, the strike power we’ve got, when they’re not getting opportunities, I don’t think it’s through a fault of their own. I think it’s probably more the symptom of what’s happening on the inside.

“I think that’s probably a little bit unfair on ‘Su.'”

Lonergan believes the Wallabies’ inability to match England in the speed with which they executed their game plan proved to be the difference between the two teams.

“I think it’s easy to come out of a game like that and look at a million things and look at everything that went wrong, but we’ve made a good point of sticking to the big rocks that we know make the big differences in those games and we probably just missed the mark on the majority of those really,” he said.

“England really beat us in those areas and that makes a huge difference. There’s technical things, but then there’s also just the speed in which we go about doing those things and, like I said, I think England beat us to most of those.”

Still confident ahead of Scotland clash

Lonergan is confident Australia can bounce back when they face Scotland at Murrayfield on Sunday and revealed that the collision battle is an area which they are fully focused on ahead of that encounter.

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“It’s probably the main point that came out of our defensive review this morning,” he revealed.

“It can come back to the speed in which you move and we just probably got caught behind the eight ball there and then they can play on top of us. It’s a snowball effect.

“There’s quite a lot of looking within going on at the moment and I’m sure there’s going to be a great turnaround this week, throughout the week and then on the weekend.

“It’s disappointing and everyone’s super disappointed with how we showed up on the weekend and I’m sure there’ll be a good bounce back from the boys.”