Should he?

Should he stay - in Oz

yes!!!!!!!

The problems with RL in this country run a lot deeper than the England/GB coach, and I'm usually loathe to put the blame on them after series/tournament defeats. However I do think Smith has performed poorly in this world cup, we lacked structure, discipline and seemed largely clueless.

I think his strategy seemed to be to keep saying we could win the comp and banging on about pace.

worrying the best coach we've had in ten years is david waite!! i think that's the closest we've been to australia

Getting rid of Smith isn't the answer.Who would you want to be the next coach? We don't have enough depth in our game,There's the problem.

Players have played woeful this world cup but we simply don't have the players to bring in for those who play e.

The culture of coaching accountability in this country has to change if we're going to start looking at the real reason why our teams perform so poorly (and this applies to the domestic competition as well).

In short ..... [size=150OUR PLAYERS ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH[/size

You just described most of the teams in our domestic competition there pal. SL is often branded a more "exciting" game to watch than the NRL, but that element of excitement, where anything can happen, spectacular breaks and individual efforts, are largely down to both teams having the exact qualities you described above in both attack and defence - where players are more successful than their equally unskillful counterparts, is where they at least have a turn of pace and can exploit chances when poor(er) defences inevitably drift apart and leave gaping holes.

This is usually described as "awesome attacking play" by our fans and media people alike, I just prefer to see it as awful defence.

In my opinion we have no other option but to change the head coach, as well as no other option but to change a lot of things within the structure of the game, top to bottom

To be GB/England manager, you need the following.

1. To have been an average rugby player in your time and
2. To have achieved success on the back of inheriting someone elses club team.

We should be pulling out all the stops to get someone in, who is a winner. A proper winner.

Who? Is anyone idea. Who would want the job?

Yes, get rid. This world cup has seen some of the worst Eng/GB performances I've ever seen.

No.

English team = English coach


There are plenty of British coaches out there who can do a job for us, i dont now why we always look to Australians.

John Kear would be a decent bet, a great motivator for the underdog which we clearly are when going into these games. Vastly experienced internationally as well as at club level.

Ellery Hanley

Kear has failed already though, plus I dont particularly rate him that much

Kear? Tried, tested and failed at this level.

2 CC wins in 20 odd attempts does not make someone a good coach.

He would be my choice.

Yep.

= irrelevant.

There is no room for parochialism when it comes to appointing a person who can prepare a team for games.

I agree - Kear did a fantastic job of motivating the England team in the 2000 world cup - at least he kept England's record defeat to less than 50 points, eh?

Hanley already coached the GB setup in 1994 - it didn't work then, and I don't see any reason why it would work now - the issue is the quality of players available, not the person at the helm.

Really? In that case why do we even bother having a coach/manager? Why dont australia just pick 17 men and tell them to do what they want?

Director of Football, not Coach,

I've got to be honest and say I half suspect the aussies could still beat us in a 3 game series if they did do that.

As to the facetiousness of your comment - you know very well what I mean. If you don't have the right quality of players available, the best coach in the world could not win a tournament for you, and by the end of it morons like yourself would be calling him a bad coach all of a sudden and calling for his head.

Tony Smith took a Huddersfield team that were utterly abysmal, and over the course of 2 years got them re-promoted to the SL and playing competetive RL to a reasonable standard by SL's standards - he then went to Leeds, who'd always had a good playing roster on paper but hadn't achieve anything for decades, and took them to a championship winning team in his first year - something which his predecessors could not manage.

Smith is not a bad coach - the quality of English players available for this tournament however, was unfortunately sub-par.

Yep, I agree with all that and have been saying it for ages.

However, to negate that, we have to have a set-up in place which enables us to take advantage if the Aussies (and to a lesser extent the Kiwis) have an off day against us. We can't match their quality but, in my opinion under David Waite (and to a lesser extent Noble until it all unravelled in the last tri-nations) we had an identifiable playing structure, whether we liked the style of it or not, which meant we were usually more competitive than we have been in this tournament, where Smith seems to have instilled nothing of the sort into his players - I can't think of any sort of gameplan that has been apparent in any of the matches.

Like I say I agree we don't have the quality, but that doesn't excuse the way we have played for most of this World Cup, being free and fluid might sound, and look, good when it comes off but when the opposition is significantly stronger that won't happen, it might work for him at Wire in 2010 but thats a different ball game altogether.