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Opinion
They’re back, baby. Australia made a triumphant return to international rugby league with a win over Fiji that had a bit of everything: they got a shock, with Fiji opening the scoring, took a few knocks, including a very nasty one for Reuben Cotter, but in the end, had too much and ran out 42-8 victors.
The healthy Leeds crowd went home happy, the Fijians showed plenty and the Aussies got their win, plus 80 minutes, plus a few nice stories to boot.
The Roar was there for it all, and here’s our tops and flops – name still pending – from a chilly, fulfilling night in Leeds.
Professional sport is often a heartless business, but would be hard not to feel a flush of sentimentality watching Josh Addo-Carr perform so well in a Kangaroos jersey after being spectacularly dumped by NSW for Origin.
Two tries, a key hand in another and top of the metres count was enough to display that Addo-Carr is born for this level of footy.
The redemption arc is obvious – and we chatted to him in the sheds all about it – so let’s instead talk about the other side of the story.
The World Cup is meant to be the best players on the biggest stage, and for the crowd in Leeds who turned up to watch the Kangaroos, they got to see one of the great sights of the game, a flying Foxx, slicing through Fijians for one of the tries of the year.
(Photo by Jan Kruger/Getty Images for RLWC)
These things matter. As a child in the north of England, the semi-annual visits from Andrew Johns, Darren Lockyer, Allan Langer and Fittler were formative in building a love for rugby league, especially the international game.
The Kangaroos are ambassadors. They should be our All Blacks, the benchmark of the sport.
The players stayed long afterwards on the field, signing jumpers and taking selfies, infuriating the media pack as we waited for the pressers to start. But that’s their job: they are what the people came to see and they were worth every penny.
If this was the big audition, it’s hard to say that Daly Cherry-Evans passed it. Granted, a man with 300+ first grade games and the most caps of any current Kangaroo probably doesn’t need to audition for anything, but it was hard not to compare his performance to one that Nathan Cleary might have put in.
Cherry-Evans was alright, I suppose, in directing a team about and kicking competently. There wasn’t a call for much more, especially when you have Cameron Munster in top form and Harry Grant running the game from dummy half.
James Tedesco was also quiet, and if there was a great competition for the 1 jersey, you’d probably also say he didn’t set the heather alight. There isn’t, so we won’t, but there is in the halfback role, so we will.
C’est la vie for DCE, who will lose his spot next week to let Cleary have a go, and will likely watch on as the Panthers half – on international debut, no less – runs rings around the Scots.
We won’t learn anything serious until the semi-finals but based on tonight, it’s Nathan’s place to lose.
When you have a thousand good players, sometimes you take them for granted. Harry Granted. You see what I’m trying to do here.
It’s worth mentioning because Australia really only need one or two guys to show up, because those guys will be really good and, most of the time, that’ll be plenty enough to win.
DCE was quiet, so was Tedesco, Cam Murray and Ben Hunt were just fine and Latrell Mitchell, though he scored, was well contained for long periods.
Cam Munster got man of the match in the stadium – presumably they drove Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles down from Newcastle after Victor Radley was given the gong there ahead of Jack Welsby, Dom Young, George Williams and Kallum Watkins.
It was Harry Grant who got the consensus vote from the watching media after his stellar showing, turning a game that threatened to get a little stodgy into a cakewalk.
Of course, this is the plan. Hunt controls the flow early, kicks when needed and keeps it tight before Grant comes on to unleash hell from dummy half.
In an age where the acting half scoot is increasingly out of vogue – go look at the stats for it over time – Grant remains the best exponent, manipulating markers and picking his moment to go.
Hunt ran just once in his hour on the field, whereas Grant managed five, and averaged over 10m on his darts. His 40/20 was superb and yielded a much-deserved try.
A major downside was just how little of this kind of thing that we have seen over the last few years. I’m not copping the Covid excuse: the Wallabies, who last time I checked are also based in Australia, have played a lot in that time and they don’t have the luxury of having entire nation’s worth of other sides living in their country.
Nights like Saturday proved why international footy is so important and why the Kangaroos are the most important part of it.
The role of good global citizen is not one that the ARLC seems interested in playing, from their inactivity at the highest level to their disdain for everyone else’s rules surrounding numbers, but even the most myopic administrator must be able to see the value in this product.
It’s nice that they were in attendance to catch it after the two-day governing body meeting in Newcastle held late last week. Less impressive if you were back in Australia, where the Kangaroos’ social media account lay silent for hours despite them playing a game.
If the flagbears of the sport play a game and there’s nobody there to tweet about it, does it make a sound?
Fiji have been through an awful lot, and that’s just in the last week. Injuries, to both players and their coach, laid them low ahead of a game that they would have stood little chance in at the best of times.
They lost a warm-up 50-0 to England, though after the Samoa slaying yesterday, perhaps that was actually a good result. We didn’t do tops and flops the first game, but it goes without saying that it was a mega flop for Samoa.
From the moment the Bati took to the field, sang their hymn – there will never be a time where that doesn’t make the hairs stand on end – and took the kickoff, they were everything they should be and more.
Committed, tough, physical – and not a little creative, too. Australia defended superbly and Fiji chucked plenty at them.
In the Pacific Test, their halves pairing was a winger, Kevin Naiqama, at five eighth and Netane Masima, who had recently played for Narellan Jets in Group 1 country footy, at halfback.
This time around, Siti Moceidreke, a career playmaker now with London Broncos in England’s second tier, was in the 6 with Brandon Wakeham in the 7. It made the world of difference. Though they lost comfortably in the end, there was plenty to build on.
At the end of the game, when they kneeled and sang with their Kangaroos combatants, it was again a moment to give you goosebumps.
Or, at least, it would have been, had the local organisers not decided to blast Annie Lennox over the top of it. Note to anyone who hosts Fiji in the coming weeks: turn off the music at the end.