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Sam Burgess is a superstar footballer who could crumple me like he was stubbing out a gasper. Hopefully this reaches him in the moments immediately after he’s experienced the calming nature of a warm tub.
The whisper on the street from me to myself is as follows: there’s been a shift in the landscape in his final year of playing the game in Australia. For the English brute, I fear his crown is under serious challenge.
When it comes to being the Pommy flavour of the month in the NRL, he’s had the run of this town for too long. There’s a new sheriff gunning for his status of Top Brit, and he’s knocking on the door to steal his crown, show him who’s boss and eventually fill this sentence with more clichés than you could poke a stick at.
James Graham – the hounds’ round mound of pound – now surely has genuine claims to top billing on the order of merit for Poms in Aussie rugby league.
Friday night’s barnstorming performance for the Bulldogs in their critical 23-18 triumph over Manly was a display completely head-and-shoulders above his contemporaries. Fans and paid scribblers were aghast at a 70-minute man of the match performance, where Graham pulled the weight for two after the early exit of Aiden Tolman and still managed to boss proceedings.
Despite collective mouths agape at this one-man show, in reality, this performance from the big fella was not a groundbreaker. Graham does it on a weekly basis. And he’s done it from day dot.
He hustles and bustles and puts his head in ugly places, all the while his stats columns climb. Put simply, his consistency is bloody well… consistent.
This bulldozing milk fridge ball-plays, bashes blokes, and rolls up the middle like that evil concrete boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark, stopping only for try lines, concussion or direct sunlight. He’s never busted, and if he is, he just whacks some Vaseline on it. Plus he’s got dude-inspiring leadership qualities and an accent that would peel the label off a warm Fosters.
With all respect to Burgess, who is still performing at a stellar level, Graham has rumbled up alongside him in terms of value, output and influence. But has Graham overtaken Burgess as the benchmark of British importation?
It’s a tough one to nut out. While Burgess has been the cat’s guts for years and would easily waltz in to the New South Wales pack if our hierarchy had the Queensland-style foresight to doctor his records, so now too would Graham.
For pure impact on the scene, again they are neck-and-neck. Both are in the rarified air of Ellery Hanley and Adrian Morley – blokes who’ve temporarily turned around Australia’s sorry opinion of anything British in rugby league and helped us to forget things like their sub-optimal domestic league that’s propped up by our hand-me-downs, and the shameful state of their once-great national side.
They’re even tough to split on the all-important aspect of ill-discipline, with both showing form in the shady sciences of plum-squeezing and biting. If we could select based on red carpet minutes it would be Burgess; if it were ranked on ability to reflect light, you can give it to Graham.
Whichever of these pasty geezers you’d prefer to be steaming on to a short ball, you have to acknowledge while there’s a strand of strawberry-blonde between them, there’s no doubt that Graham is as close to the title as he’s ever been – if not there already.
Come next year, when Burgess chooses the knee-high fog of the English rugby season over the awful 20-degree winter of Australia, it will be a moot point.
While Englishmen like Gareth Widdop, George Burgess and Sam Tomkins are world class in their own right, you can be sure of one thing. Barring a Vaseline shortage, Graham will be the NRL’s King of England in 2015.