Time to do things the Aussie way

THERE is a memorable little speech in the caper film Lucky Number Slevin in which Sir Ben Kingsley, playing a reclusive gangster rabbi (as you do), comes out with the following:

“My father used to say: ‘The first time someone calls you a horse you punch him on the nose, the second time someone calls you a horse you call him a fool but the third time someone calls you a horse, well then perhaps it’s time to go shopping for a saddle’.”

Which brings us around to the England rugby league team’s huge World Cup defeat at the weekend.

There was nothing remotely lucky about Tony Smith’s boys, who took on a fearsome 52-4 beating at the hands of their supreme antipodean cousins. Every mistake was seized upon with a hunger that bordered on rage.

Despite a fair amount of pre-tournament optimism, the number was definitely up for the English. It was almost cruel.

It wasn’t even that England played particularly badly within the team’s limitations. There were a few individual errors and the defence on the edges was frail to say the least, but overall the fire-fighting forwards went pretty well and the backs did the best they could.

One of the big problems England face is that on these shores, the offensive game is based on causing havoc through quick play-the-balls and that doesn’t really work when referees allow NRL-style lying on in the tackle which negate such a tactic.

It is so ingrained over here, though, that there is a chronic lack of ideas against a set defence and little evidence of defence-splitting skills in our halves at the top level. Where is our Darren Lockyer ever going to come from?

Maybe it is a case of clutching at straws, but we could do with trying to adopt Australian standards at the ruck over here — giving defences more time to recover — and see if that makes a difference in years to come.

Even aside from possibly improving our international prospects, it would at least encourage craft and invention and, dare I say, help attract the attention of the disinterested.


THE England cricket team’s monumental hammering at the hands of the Stanford Superstars at the weekend could be seen as poetic justice given the barrage of negativity emerging from within the camp in the build-up.

The floodlights are too low, the hotel isn’t up to much, the pitch is slow, the trophy wives are being hassled by the bloke who will give us all $1million to win one 20-over thrash in the Caribbean. The heart truly bleeds.

mattchambers@oldham-chronicle.co.uk