International rugby league

Sproj said:
If Nsemba and Smithies weren’t injured, Wane should be sacked those on those two omissions alone. His problem is that he picks blokes on reputation and not on current ability, which is fine for club football, not rep when you have other better players available.

Williams looked average all ESL season and stifles Lewis. Mikey is the player the side needs to be built around. Instead it seemed he just had instructions to give the ball to Williams and just shuffle it on.

Welsby missed half the season through injury, he’s way off the pace and it showed in the games he do play when he can back. He’s looked banged up for 18 months which has made him regress. Pick someone else there and let him get his body right.

England’s middles were awful, not only did they make no metres, they missed a million tackles as well. Bateman isn’t good enough anymore, yet he keeps getting picked.

Finally on their coach, he came out in the presser saying a few times Aus is better than us, and while that is true, what message does it send to your players?
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I thought Williams was the only one that looked dangerous and Lewis looked ordinary. Brimson needs to come in at fullback. He is no world beater but welsby is bang average.
 
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Lockysillegitimatechild said:
The most dissapointing thing about england was their forwards. Thats normally their strength but they were shithouse last night. Wheres the big aggressive psychos? Wane has really stuffed up with this squad, i dont see where he can improve teamlist-wise in the pack.

The other bad thing was their attack in the oppostion 20m. Austtalias defence was just too good for them, they had their chances but they didnt know how to finish it off.

The positives were the wingers, herbie, halves were good but need to gel better, KPP wasnt bad, litten was great, kmowles... and then not much else. Smithies needs to come in (english nrl players were noticably englands best as they knew what to expect), with brimson off thw bench to be an attacking difference OR straight up replace welsby if he has another stinker (normally rate him but terrible last night, stiffled the attack).
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The forwards certainly arent at the levels they were a few years ago when you had the likes of Peacock, Morley, Burgess, Ellis, Hill etc playing. Apart from Lees there is no mongrel in their pack.
 
Not a good start for Tonga... Samoa might put a score on to finish this
 
Payne 1v1 with a five eight 5m out... zero chance for Iongi right there
 
The game last week appears to have been massive for Samoa... will be interested to see how Tonga go next week with a game under their belt, but they're playing NZ so they'll be up against it again.

You'd almost want the upper tier of this Pac Champs to be 4 teams so there are no byes (i.e. PNG get promoted and would've played Tonga in week 1) and then maybe a 3 game series with the two remaining teams of the pacific bowl (Fiji vs Cook Islands), winner of that 3 game series plays 4th place of the upper tier for the relegation battle.

Fiji vs Cook Islands is not a great series to televise (I'd still probably watch it), but they lose that one game per week to get Tonga vs PNG, etc. so it's a net gain from a TV perspective
 
Koula must've been injured in the early tackles of this game, because he's been a non factor in this game and is now getting schooled by Tago
 
Thought Paulo or Nanai were probably Samoa's best... I'd go Paulo for MOTM personally

Luai was much better with his halfback play, but Paulo was a great link man in the middle to give more room to the backline
 
BroncsFan said:
Thought Paulo or Nanai were probably Samoa's best... I'd go Paulo for MOTM personally

Luai was much better with his halfback play, but Paulo was a great link man in the middle to give more room to the backline
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Ryles watching that game would have been taking notes.
 
Why does Somoa and Tonga struggle to get decent paying sponsors when they literally play in the same games as the Tier 1 teams, there is no way companies from the Islands have the money to pay more than peanuts.
 
One idea I was thinking of to solve the England international issue for europe would be to have a SL based Aussie team play them.

We do a similar thing in soccer based on the internationals where some games we put A league players in due to the schedules and others we only have european based players, I think it would be a good happy medium.

Given the Aussie contingent in the SL are generally some of the better players in the league I think it should be reasonably competitive.

At the bare minimum just off my head we definitely would have the best fullback and half from the SL in the Aussie team in Field and French.

As a side note if NRL ends up taking over SL we really need to bring the good up and coming french players to Australia, they are the obvious national team that needs help to become competitive, we have already seen them start to move to england to play for better teams.
 
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