Would a Pommie invasion of the NRL be best for England ?

 
Gareth Ellis is already there. Sam Burgess will join him in the NRL next season, along with Mark Flanagan ... and not forgetting Gareth Widdop. Gareth who ? He's the 20-year-old half back from Halifax, who emigrated to Oz with his family in 2005, starred for Melbourne in the Storm's Toyota Cup Grand Final win over Wests Tigers and was the club's under-20s player of the year.

Will it take a mass migration of Poms to make a competitive England team ? After Ellis's successful crossover from Super League, following on from Adrian Morley and Brian Carney, it's clear that our top players can make it Down Under, but so few seem prepared to follow the lead of Ellis, Morley and now Burgess in the present England team. Look at New Zealand, a team no longer composed of players from its domestic competition but scattered across the NRL landscape, as well as at the Warriors.

Sam Tomkins, Kyle Eastmond, Ryan Hall and Tom Briscoe are rising talents in Super League but how much further would they progress if steeled in the fires of the NRL ? It's still amazing to me that British players won't even venture to Perpignan and play for Catalans Dragons. But if England are beaten by Australia and New Zealand over the next two weeks, can players of ambition really afford to cling to their home comforts ?

The following article appears in Wednesday's Times ...

Gareth Ellis is that rare beast, a Pom in the NRL. “I can tell you,” Ellis said, “they don’t reckon too much to Super League down there.”

Domestic rugby league will gets its annual health check on Saturday from Australia, whose 52-4 hammering of England in the pool stages of the 2008 World Cup simply hardened attitudes Down Under after another merciless exposure of the British game’s soft underbelly.

Ellis, like Adrian Morley, his fellow England forward, before him, has done his bit during his first season at Wests Tigers to convince sceptics that the Super League can still produce home-grown talent capable of thriving in the sport’s most ferociously competitive environment.

Indeed, Ellis was the Sydney club’s player of the year. Not that you will catch anyone in Australia, despite raised eyebrows there at a 20-20 draw with New Zealand at the weekend, expecting anything other than a walloping in Wigan for England on Saturday — a match the Kangaroos must win to stay on course for the Gillette Four Nations final at Elland Road on November 14.

Ellis, 28, will be joined in the NRL next year by another rugged England forward, Sam Burgess, who has signed for South Sydney Rabbitohs. As happened with the powerful New Zealand team, who are no longer drawn from their domestic competition but are all steeled in the Australian league furnace, the suspicion is that it may take a mass migration of leading English players to the hotspots of Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne to create a national team capable of competing against the two southern hemisphere superpowers.

Morley mostly ploughed a lone furrow while at Sydney Roosters, his pleas to Great Britain team-mates to follow him ignored, until Brian Carney had a successful spell at Newcastle Knights in 2006. Ellis left after winning a second Super League title with Leeds Rhinos for the NRL hothouse. “It was something I wished to do and it’s worked out better than I could have hoped for,” he said. “I’d urge others to try but only, if like Sam, they really want to.”

Tim Sheens, the Australia coach, who is also Ellis’s club coach at Wests, said: “I thought he’d take time to settle, but he didn’t. He hit the ground running. From game one, he was strong, he hit hard and stayed out there for 80 minutes. He looked like an Aussie playing an Aussie game, he knuckled in and worked hard. We had a good season and he was outstanding.

“Last year in the World Cup he was replaced regularly during the games, but there was only once in our season when he didn’t finish. Under our conditions, the hardness of the ground means the game can be physical, but he handled it pretty well. You only have to listen to opposition players who said, ‘how hard is that Pom kid?’ ”

Ellis appreciates from the hiding in Melbourne 12 months ago how Australia can overwhelm opponents. “They could probably field two or three teams,” he said. “Every club has two or three superstars in their team and then there’s those just underneath who are really good players as well. They seem to have a production line, but I think England will eventually follow suit.

“It’s starting to happen. It’s a young squad this time around and some of them only made an impression in Super League the last 12 months. We all know what we’re up against and we need to make sure we’re ready for them.”

Comments

[Jeffrey G]

At the moment the NRL gives players a test every week. Some teams at the bottom of Super League don't offer that to the players that are likely to make the England side.

That said, there are only so many Englishmen that would make the trip down under and the team would still lack depth if more players went to the NRL compared to strengthening the standard of the Super League. Instead of buying some second rate Aussie, Super League clubs would be better off developing their home grown players. Burgess, Morley, et al have shown that there are plenty of good ones there if you look.

[Daniel]

It can be hard enough to get a British Rugby League player to move far from home, even within his own country.

Of those who have, they seem to get homesick very easily and return before the benefits of playing on the NRL could have any effect.

Since the move to Summer Rugby in the Northern hemisphere, players can no longer go for a short stint in the British off-season, just to get a taste of the NRL.

Also, the exchange rate and the salary cap mean that a Superleague player heading down under isn't going to profit financially.

The best bet is to get them young, when they aren't tied down with wife and kid(s) that would need relocation, and when some broadened horizons would be good for them, both on and off the pitch. Burgess is a good example of this.

I think there are quite a few youngsters in Superleague who would go pretty well in the NRL and be improved as players in the process.

[Mike hunt]

Our players have to be good enough to play in the NRL if they are not they don't get asked! simple as, also why should they when they have a wealth of their own talent!

[St.Di]

Why on earth do we want to lose our young talent to the NRL? We shouldn't be talking about our young players going over there but about raising the standards of coaching and skills over here. To do that we need to train good committed coaches, which takes investment, who will in turn impart high standards of skill to our players, and restrict overseas players within our ranks so that our backline develops sufficiently to be a challenge to anyone else.

Sean Long did not spend time in the NRL yet few would doubt that he has been one of the best scrum halves in the modern era. British born, British produced and British played - even helping us to beat the Aussies on their turf - and yet there is this attitude from some who think that the only way the Superleague is going to improve is by giving away its best young talent to the NRL.

I think to encourage young players to emigrate is like looking down the telescope the wrong way. We have to closely examine our own game and raise it to match the best. It isn't like we have never beaten the Aussies. We need to look back and investigate what it is that we had then which we do not have now, and fix it.

[bob of Queensland]

Fair enough, you guys play on a wet track more often than us but that should not effect the pace during the first twenty minutes of a game. I put this lack of speed down to one thing: Pommie rugby league players are NOT PROFESSIONAL ATHELETS.

Most of them look like NRL players -from twenty years ago. Which, on the bright side, makes English Super League slightly watchable for me because my favourite kind of players are the likes of Walley Lewis and Jason Smith, and in the current game, Thursty and Cam Smith - these guys are natural born league players, tough as nails with the street smarts to match. And I see these same qualities in several of the current players in your Super League.

So it's not that you don't have the individual talent available, the problem for England is that this genuine talent you've got is not supported by professional athletes out there on the paddock, and, as mentioned in a previous comment, this lack of athleticism refers to both team mates AND opponents.

If we look at the NRL today, compared to twenty years ago, the difference is that today it mostly consists of ATHLETES that could have played almost any other sport professionally - just look at who supports our natural born fortballers (locky, thursty, cam smith, slater) we've got a backline that looks like they could slip straight into the olympic swimming/track/basketball team - all the while carrying as much combined weight as the forward pack.
How can the English team ever hope to compete against that?

Sending your up and coming players down our way will be good for some immediate returns on the international front but it will just continue to reduce the quality of your domestic competition - which, by all accounts, is the real obstacle to developing your national team.

I don't know much about your sporting culture but I hear that your soccer players get paid gazillions - so maybe the scouts in that game are soaking up all the serious athletic talent available to your country? Whereas a kid growing up in Australia, if he has talent and commitment, will generally end up playing either aussie rules or rugby league.
Soccer is simply unappealing to the vast majority of Aussies because it
we think it's a wimp or sissies game where limp wristed hair cuts and toffy pay packets are preferred to any notion of a tough and gritty physical contest.

It seems that English Super League resembles, to some extent, the game of soccer in Australia. Not only do suitably talented players leave the country at an early age, but also the low level ranking of the game in our sporting landscape means that it's hard for the domestic comp here to attract and keep quality support staff (admin, sports science, player development, fitness/specialist coaching etc). Is this the same problem that besets rugby league in England? - a serious lack of structural support for the game in general?

When I consider that you Poms get only 12,000 mostly expat supporters to a NZ v AUS game boasting the best league players on earth - that really says something about the standing of the sport in England; a country with 60 odd million people!

If I was coaching the poms this Saturday, I'd send at least ten of your starting line up out onto the field with pen and paper in hand so they can take notes.

My prediction: England will beat Australia in rugby league on the same day that Sydney FC defeats Man U.

And give those Ashes a polish for us.

cheers.

Bob.

[phil]

st di is correct when she says one of the keys is to raise the quality level of coaching in this country. the best time to improve young british players is in the academy set up.

saints' foundation academy is currently on tour in australia playing the academy teams from 4 nrl teams and by all accounts, having won 2 out of 3 games to date, having a good tour. interestingly, one of the coaches commented how, due to the weather and having the group together on tour, they have managed to do 3 months of training in 3 weeks.

this can only benefit saints in the long term and i wonder how many other superleague teams send their young prospects on tours like this?

[phil]

one other point, does anyone know whether there is an academy level 4 nations tournament?

if not, surely this could be a good way to continue the development of young talent from all the countries, making international rugby league a more attractive proposition. i would pay to go watch england academy/ under 20's play their aussie counterparts.

we struggle for many reasons, one of which is the low profile of the international game compared to union. you currently have stephen myler, chris ashton and david strettle, all quality footballers who played league before moving to union - would they still have crossed if international rugby league had the standing of union?

i was at the stoop last saturday, a cracking game and brilliant advert for rugby league but cannot understand why there were so many empty seats? i can understand trying to tap into the aussies and kiwis living in london but would the organisers not have been better off playing at say headingly in front of what would have surely been a sell out crowd? what message does it give out that the organisers are unable to sell 12,700 tickets to see 2 of the best international rugby sides play each other. well other than london isn't bothered about rugby league.

[Grant]

Sean Long, one of the best scrum halves of the modern era? That's a good one. He never once came up to the mark when faced with serious opposition. If he had been man enough to take on the best players in the best League in the world, being pushed every single game, then maybe he would have become a great player. The same goes for Sculthorpe, McGuire, burrows, Deacon, Cunningham, Sinfield etc. Morley deserves respect because he put humself out there. Playing in the best comp can only make you a better player. Playing in a crap comp like SL just keeps them in their comfort zone.

[adrian]

Agree with Bob from Q - Just think there is a better level of athleticism of players playing in the NRL. I think it helps when you have 3 games so closely linked that are so popular - Aussie Rules, league & Union. In England we have loads of dare I say it 'secondary' sports absorbing talent & 1 huge 1 - football that it dilutes down the number of quality athletes in each sport. I think the basics are the raw material that goes into the NRL is better than the Super League. A good case in point is Danny maguire - a good player in SL but look at him & he has not got an athletic build & he runs like a duck on speed! Lockyer meanwhile runs like a quality athlete.

Its a bit 1984ish but someone needs to oversee the whole sports landscape and dictate which sports we want to do well in and which ones we don't internationally and guide youngsters accordingly although still allow other sports to flourish if there is the interest.

[Arthur Snott]

It's an insulting comment by Barbie Bob of Q'land that out players are not Athletes, that's rubbish, they train hard and are full time professionals, you roo/gator eating dingo. It's simple RL is your national game, as far as it can be next to pizza throwing and spit roasting, must be a barbie sport!
It is not ours Soccer is so our lads are generally not brought up to play the game! As for rain, that makes no difference, it peed it down during the third test in the early 90's when it was 1 a piece, and we were cushed by the Aussies so to say we perform better in rain is a myth!

[peter, newcastle, australia]

To Arthur Snott, You're wrong on one major point, RL is not our national (winter) game. Australian Rules Football is by far the most popular code in Australia - our national sport. In fact AFL crowd figures are (still current I think) second only to NFL games in the USA.

[Duncan]

Rugby league is certainly the main sport in NSW and QLD though. Here in Victoria and also in TAS, SA, WA and NT Aussie rules does dominate.

[john]

Bob is basically right on the point about the standing of RL in this country. Now, if I were an RFL administrator, I would be approaching the acadamies run by the proper football clubs, to see if any of the kids let go at 16 fancy a trial (I would be doing the same if i were a Tennis bod, or athletics, or whatever).