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As the clock ticks down to arguably the biggest date on this year’s international rugby league calendar – England v Australia at Wembley – fans on both sides of rugby league world will be asking themselves a familiar question. When will England finally get it together?
Unfortunately, at least for the proud fans in rugby league’s oldest heartland, Saturday morning’s game is likely to provide a familiar answer. Not yet, lad. Not yet.
From the outside looking in, the fate of the English national side has a depressing quality which befits even the hardened cynicism of a rugby league public famous for its bouts of the glums.
The last decade – which itself followed a relatively barren run in the 1980s and 1990s – has seen the fortunes of the national side oscillate between bad and worse.
Fiercely competitive series ended in a succession of last-minute whitewashes (the Ashes in 2003). Lone wins against the Kangaroos (in 2001 and 2004) were followed by embarrassing defeats (in Sydney in 2002 and a crushing Tri Nations final in 2004). Hopes were raised (series sweep against the Kiwis in 2007) only to be cruelly and publically dashed (an insipid World Cup performance in 2008).
Every now and then, some class shone through (in an away win over the Kangaroos in 2006 and a spirited 2009 Four Nations final). But even in the brightest moments the national side was only 20 minutes or a ‘should-win’ game away from despair.
All the while the RFL have been busily re-engineering and (re-re-engineering) national set up. But the biggest, like most of the others, was largely cosmetic: the shift from the proud old ‘Great Britain’ (plus Brian Carney) moniker to the ‘England’ tag.
In the coaching box and on the field, though – where it really counts – not much has changed.
They’ve ditched the blue chevron for a red cross, but the men in white, generally speaking, still can’t take a trick.
Coaches and captains have been shuffled. Halves have been called up, discarded and recalled and discarded again, driving some to drink (not always in that order). Some promising young stars have done their best time at her Majesty’s pleasure rather than after God Save the Queen.
A succession of outside backs bumbled, stumbled and fumbled their way back into relative obscurity, or fat rugby union contracts. Now even that one great constant – the bobbing bald dome of Keith Senior, who provided perhaps the brightest moment of the decade with an intercept try to seal a proud victory over the Kangaroos in 2004 – has succumbed, with customary grace, to the ravages of time.
On some accounts things have actually deteriorated. Ten years ago, for all the heartbreaking hope-and-despair cycle of close-run series defeats in the 1990s, you could at least point to some true world class in the British line up. Andy Farrell. Paul Schulthorpe. Adrian Morley. Keiron Cunningham. And, a little later, Stuart Fielden and Gareth Ellis.
Today, stripped of all the talented Scots and Welshman notable only by their absence in the intervening decade, the now English team features only a couple of the classy old stagers from earlier this decade. Honourable mentions to Jamie Peacock and James Graham. A nod to Kevin Sinfield for long (if not particularly effectual) service, and to the absence of a genuinely world-class (if sometimes ham-fisted) Sam Burgess, and that’s about it as far as the top-shelf goes.
In short, the English component of the England team is long on serviceable forwards, honest toilers and youngsters with potential. They’re all good players, and some are a good deal better than that. They’d all hold their own, or more, in the NRL. But none of them stand up and scream: prime of career, world class, stop-me-if-you-can.
With one small, pacey, notable exception: the skinny youngster at the back – Sam Tomkins.
And it is with Tomkins, and youngsters like him that, the second great hope-to-despair cycle-within-a-cycle starts for the British game.
It’s been a long time now since ‘shock’ defections of English rugby league players to the other code came as a genuine surprise. Jason Robinson proved that the RFU types were canny; Andy Farrell – last sighted at prop for Wigan, but destined for backs in rugby union – proved that they weren’t fussy, or that the standards were considerably lower, or both.
Since then, the league’s most likely looking youngsters are only a rumour and a headline away from a rugby union contract, be it for club or country.
And English team featuring Kyle Eastmond and Chris Ashton, just for starters, might have proved a much sterner test for the Kangaroos at Wembley.
And Tomkins could yet be the latest installment. Just last month his own brother was the latest in the now-long line of league-to-union converts. Wigan might have deep pockets as far as the Super League goes, but even the proudest club in the game can’t match the money on offer elsewhere under the current system.
All this is a cruel irony for a code long on the receiving end of the cross-code chequebook transfer system (or, for those of a more aristocratic bearing, belated comeuppance for a century of professionalism, pillage and plunder).
Crueller still is irony that the very thing rugby league needs most in its battle with big brother in England – a strong national side and the stronger national presence which goes with it – is the very thing its inability to retain its already-shallow pool of talented youngsters inhibits.
Even it Tomkins resists the cross code pull, he’ll need to avoid the other great pitfall for young English stars of the last decade: that of early promise but ultimately unrealized potential.
Two genuine club level stars of English rugby league who did resist the bigger union money in the 2000s – Kevin Sinfield and Danny Maguire – have, despite long international careers, never quite ascended to the heights suggested by pace of their early rise.
And arguably the most talented English half of the last decade in Sean Long – who famously bailed on the Great Britain imd-tour in 2006 after leading the Lions to a famous win over the Kangaroos in Sydney – barely gave a yelp at international level despite a long and decorated club career.
So where does this leave England ahead of this weekend’s clash? Check back tomorrow for part two.
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