THEY may have retained the Ashes with a game to spare, but Australia halfback Cameron Munster was quick to praise the efforts of England in both the opening two games.

After going down 26-6 at Wembley in game one, an improved England performance at Everton’s Hill Dickinson Stadium saw them go into half-time level after two goals each from Harry Smith and Nathan Cleary. 

England had failed to score with three big opportunities in the first half and were made to pay when Australia scored twice in four minutes early in the second half.

“England are a good quality team, but so are we,” said Munster after the 14-4 win.

“Their attack is really good, but we just work so hard on our defence. So we’re not taking anything away from England. Defensively, and attack-wise, they’re up for the challenge but we’ve scrambled well.

“If you look at the first game it took three moments from Reece Walsh to stop tries from them, so it could have been a different scoreline.

“There were a couple of times tonight as well where they put some dints in us and created some opportunities, but the effort areas that we talk about as a group worked well for us.

“At times we were under the pump, but it took some moments from some top blokes to fill the space and work hard for each other.

“Take nothing away from England – they were great.”

The first of those Australia tries came from Munster after 49 minutes when he slid over out wide, but he later defended the score against claims it should not have been given.

Former England and Great Britain international James Graham, who was part of the BBC commentary team, believed that because Munster ran behind Angus Crichton in the build-up, should have been penalised and, therefore, not been in a position to cross for the crucial score.

“He’s a Pommy, isn’t he, of course he’s going to be biased towards his own team,” Munster said when he was told of Graham’s thoughts.

“There’s obviously grey areas in our game. I could talk about going behind a block (runner) but at the end of the day the rules have changed a little bit, where if the block doesn’t take anyone out or stand in someone’s way, it’s ‘play on’, and if you look, George Williams and AJ Brimson still had that much time to tackle me.

“I think that played in my favour and with it being a little bit wet, I was able to slide across. In a normal dry game, I probably don’t even make that.

“It’s one of those things. It went up as a try and it was a try… you can’t overturn those things. If he went ‘no try’, it wouldn’t have been a try.”