SHAUN WANE’s contemplative face at full-time said it all.

How are England going to make up a 20-point deficit in seven days?

No doubt that is what he was thinking.

And how are we going to deal with Reece Walsh?

Earlier this week the RFL announced that the player of the series will be given the inaugural Fulton-Reilly Award.

Walsh put down a massive marker at Wembley to become the first winner of that medal. It’s already hard to imagine another player winning it, assuming that Reece can stay out of injury trouble at Everton and Headingley in the next two weeks.

After winning the Clive Churchill Medal as the outstanding player in the NRL Grand Final three weeks earlier, he was clearly the outstanding player at Wembley.

He scored two tries and prevented two possible England tries with knockdowns of passes from Herbie Farnworth to Jack Welsby and Jake Wardle to Tom Johnstone.

His only obvious error was a mis-directed pass to Josh Addo-Carr, which went into touch in the 16th minute.

He gained 236 metres and made two line breaks.

But it wasn’t a one-man show by Australia.

Their backrower Angus Crichton also scored two tries and had an outstanding match, gaining 144 metres from 13 ball carries.

I had been looking forward to seeing how the Queenslanders Walsh, Cameron Munster and Harry Grant would combine with the New South Wales halfback Nathan Cleary.

From England’s point of view, there is always a lingering hope that the Blues and Maroons won’t get along when they come together in the Australian side. But this time there was absolutely no sign of that, even though Cleary wasn’t perhaps as dominant as we sometimes see him in club football.

The problem facing Wane is that there was no one in the England side who had the explosive pace of Walsh. The only player who could potentially have emulated Walsh’s impact on the game was AJ Brimson, who was sitting on the bench as the 18th man.

As someone remarked to me at half-time, England’s main hope was that they would suffer a couple of injuries that would allow Shaun to bring Brimson onto the field.

But it would now be very surprising if he doesn’t replace Jack Welsby at fullback, given that Jack generally looked out of sorts at Wembley.

I also suspect that Morgan Smithies will be brought into the matchday squad next week. Smithies has shown during his time with Canberra Raiders that he has the attributes needed to represent England, while he also has age and energy on his side, compared to some of the England forwards who are into their thirties.

After the game there were some interesting team stats that gave us some insights into what worked and didn’t work for England.

The Aussies enjoyed 53 percent of possession, but England enjoyed the higher completion rate – 72 percent against 69 percent.

Australia made far more metres – 1,724 as opposed to 1,204 – and they had 489 post-contact metres compared to England’s 386.

The Aussies’ average gain in each six-tackle set was 47.91 metres, as opposed to England’s 33.46.

And, thanks to Walsh, they had a massive 277 kick-return metres, compared to England’s 82.

On the other hand, England gained more kicking metres – 701 compared to 545.

The two teams were almost identical in terms of missed tackles – Australia missed 38 and England missed 39.

But perhaps the most surprising statistic is that Australia made the most errors – 14 compared to England’s eleven.

Unfortunately those statistics do back up Kevin Walters’ assertion that Australia are capable of significant improvement before the second Test this Saturday.

As for England, things didn’t quite fall our way throughout the game.

The two knockdowns by Walsh of potential scoring passes by Farnworth and Wardle reminded us that he is a perfect judge of when an opponent is about to pass the ball. Perhaps this week the English centres should be advised to try to sell him some dummies.

The kick into the in-goal by Tom Johnstone shortly before half-time went agonisingly dead when being pursued by Welsby and Mikey Lewis.

And what a shame it was that Kai Pearce-Paul’s offload on the Australian line on 68 minutes was just knocked forward by Williams’ upper arm before Lewis touched it down.

So as I see it there were at least four potential chances for England tries that on another day may have turned into points.

Let’s hope that we are capable of even more improvements than the Australians are capable of.