Australians should be embarrassed by that refereeing performance.
No complaints with the result. Better team won but when you’re playing the best team in the world and the ref, you’ve no ing chance.

agree with Shaul but at the risk of going over old ground i can't help thinking Sneyd would have been a good partner for widdop - leave him to do most of the the kicking and let widdop use his running game more. hope they will at lease look at this potential partnership in the next couple of years

This kind of statement is only the second most prevalent behind "our forwards are lots harder than yours" or some such crap, both these sentiments get trotted out every time we play, boring as e

If you think that the atmosphere is terrible, blame yourselves for not being able to produce any competition, i'm in my late 40s & i have no idea what its like to be beaten by England in any substantial capacity, you've made it boring, your team fails to inspire, you won't find too much better atmosphere in RL than state of origin, thats because the english can't play it, thank god

Oh look, another one

errrrrrr i don't think this is the time or place for you to proposition me old chap, i'm not that kind of boy, have you got a sister???

Well looky what we have here

I agree. There were things he didn't give that could easily have gone in Australia's favour. I don't think we can have any complaints. It's just unfortunate that the O'Loughlin one led to a try.

I thought we were superb in the 2nd half and the scoreline flatters Australia a bit. Overall it's hard to be too disappointed though. In the past we've been steamrollered by them many times. I feared at half time that might have happened but it didn't. If only we could have scored when it was 10-4. That would really have made things interesting.

Great effort by all the England players. No shame in losing when you've given everything like they did today.

Boring in the first half. BORING!

Some players didn’t turn up defensively when the rest of the team were tackling their hearts out.

Kicking game was so poor!

The ref was appalling!

Second half much better. But still lacked a killer instinct and purpose on play6.

Ref still appalling!

A bit embarrassing for our sport to see a small stadium with empty seats in a World Cup game between the two favourites that was about 1/5 England fans.

The ref let the game flow, what more do you want, if he'd blown the pea out of it, you'd still be whinging, he gave both teams every chance to show their wares, yet, we still have all this butt hurt whinging, sad

I thought Whitehead went ok, 7 runs for 52 metres, but made 51 tackles. Thought Hodgson was poor, Roby twice the Hooker and would play him for the full 80. Currie to stay in the 17 for me, drop Heighington and bring in Taylor and Walmsley. One more chance for Lomax, but if he messes up again then Widdop to 1 and Williams to 6

He gave Aus a penalty that lead to a try in the first half when he let the same thing flow the other way three times.

He gave Aus a scrum for a knock-on when the tackler pulled Gerry down twice after the tackle was complete which stopped our flow.

He gave Aus a penalty that was kicked when it was a loose carry.

Toddle off. Next world cup in 4 years?

See you then, you can crawl out of your cave and masturbate over pommy whingeing again.

We've now had 12 loses against the Aussie with the same old comments of "lots of positives to take from the game".

Anyone ever going to turn all the positives into an actual win?

What on Earth has Heighington done to justify his selection? I could think of a dozen average SL players who could take his role in the squad.

no, thats your opinion, thats not what happened

I don't care about world cups, we just need the NRL season to hurry up & come around again

Deludedo

“I don’t care”... but come on the game thread and reply to every post

Luke 'it's all about me' Gale didn't really do much.

He was only a touch better than his invisible man 'performance' in the Grand Final.

It's certainly something to look at in the future. I agree that Widdop is better when he has someone doing the organising and kicking. Would imagine that this would be a last hurrah for some of the players.

Trouble is international rugby is so random that we might only get 1 or 2 tournaments before the next rugby world cup to try out these combinations. And you can't really just turn up at the WC without some previous experience of them playing together. And hope it turns out well.

On the back of a pack that got him on the front foot.

What are you doing on this thread then? You pathetic moron! Are you one of those fake Aussies?

It was never mentioned during the game, however from me it looked like England were running into the wind in the first half.

You could see this in the drop outs that struggled to get to the 40 metre line.

In the second half with Australia running into the wind it was noticeable that they lost a lot of momentum, in part because they could no longer rely on big downtown kicks.
Were Australias game management shone though was that their halves knew to keep the ball low, and go for touch. This stopped England form getting momentum in kick returns. Something Australia got in spades when England just kicked down their throats in the first half.

I thought it was interesting that Billy Slater said he thought the English back 3 in Lomax, Mgilvrey and Hall were dangerous. Many people on here clearly dont think Lomax is upto it. However the Aussies obviously found him difficult to handle, and someone who needed a lot of watching.

Hopefully we can kick on from this, we were not outclassed by a long way, infact it was a tough arm wrestle of a game.

I would keep the halves as they are to build structure. However would look at squad rotation to rest some of the big forwards, and also to give some of the backs like Percival and Williams a run out to see how they go in case injuries hit.

quiet night in Sydney town man, nothing else on, no drinkies tonight, early surf

Doesnt mean Lomax wasnt crap. Both wingers played very well, Lomax got into good positions but came up with costly errors.