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MANCHESTER: The morning after the night before, and the Rugby League World Cup final victory by Australia over Samoa only looks better. What looked at the time was a solid performance from a team that were always favourites has morphed into an excellent showing that limited a dangerous opposition.
As shows of dominance go, this was a pretty forceful one. It’s hard to write Tops & Flops columns about a team that wins 90% of its games, but there’s usually a few holes to be found.
Today, less so. This is going to be a wave of positivity, and given that the Kangaroos just won the World Cup, it can’t really be otherwise.
There’s a lot of cynicism in the world and plenty more of it in rugby league, but in all honesty, sometimes you have to sit back and say you saw the best team play really well. It’s a little patronising to say that Samoa were plucky underdogs who played their part, but that is true too: the scenes from Apia, Auckland, Liverpool and Utah were all inspiring too, and worked whoever won the game. If only their coach had focussed on that a little more.
It felt like a good day for Australia, Samoa and the international game. Which, when you think about it, is really what you want from a World Cup Final. Here’s a few tops and one flop.
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I didn’t know whether to include this as a top – for the coach – or a flop, for myself. I have to hold my hand up and say I didn’t expect Mal to coach the way he has, or to pick the right team, and (though it seems in the dim and distant past) I’m pretty sure I wrote several times that the biggest threat to Australia was themselves, because their coach would mess it up.
In the end, unsurprisingly, Mal knows a fair bit more about coaching the Kangaroos than I do. Rep footy is a different beast to the week-to-week grind of the NRL, and doubly so when you’re the coach of the best team with the best players.
As anyone who reads these columns will know, I love philosophies, strategy, tactics, stats and all that good stuff. Mal is none of those things. I don’t think he has a coaching philosophy like a Michael Cheika, Trent Robinson, Shaun Wane or any of the other great bosses at this tournament.
What he does have is a huge aura, a bucketload of experience and the ability to communicate to elite players. You don’t need to hone a system when your players are as good as Australia’s are, you just need to get them to play to their ability and the rest will take care of itself.
Every single player loves Mal. They tell you it repeatedly. You see in their performances that they really enjoy each other’s company, being on tour and playing in the green and gold. The Kangaroos scored 52 tries and conceded just eight, which is the product of great defensive resolve, which itself is the product of effort, teamwork and resilience.
Good players will score points, great teams defend collectively. That’s all on Mal.
(Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)
Matt Parish is a very different story as a coach. He took his team to the final, so I won’t have a go about his on-field abilities here, but off-field, he did the game and the event a disservice by making his first comments in the presser about the refereeing.
On an occasion like that, with Samoa having achieved something truly historic, we didn’t need chat about a 40/20 they didn’t get in the first five minutes that had zero bearing on the game.
Obviously he was going to be asked about the non-decision on Angus Crichton, but Parish could quite easily have deflected, said it was in the past and talked about how great his team had been.
Instead, he stuck the boot into Ashley Klein – who has been the best ref by miles in the last six months, almost to the day since the Cowboys incident – over what was, to my mind, a borderline decision. It might have edged into red territory, but yellow was a perfectly agreeable call too. It wasn’t a howler and Klein is certainly not a weak referee: if anything, he is often a bit too Hollywood.
Regular readers of these columns know that I hate talking about refs because they rarely decide results. The officials certainly did not alter the ending in the World Cup.
Parish was never going to have a go at Oregon Kaufusi, for example, who failed to attempt to tackle Josh Addo-Carr because he was offside and directly caused James Tedesco’s first try, and it would have been very harsh had he done so. That one incident didn’t change the game. Neither did Klein’s call.
If anything, the weakness is in Parish for taking the cheap shot at the ref rather than owning the performance, and saying how great his side had been to get to where they got.
O ye of little faith, Tedesco doubters. Big players turn up big on big occasions, so it shouldn’t be surprising at all that the Kangaroos captain saved his best for last.
He has been the best player in two of three Origins, he was the best Roosters player by a mile all year and now he’s the man of the match in the World Cup final. He does it so often we all take it for granted. We actually discussed the other fullback more than the guy who was obviously going to decide the lot.
Between Teddy and Latrell Mitchell, who also produced his most convincing performance of the tournament, the Kangaroos blew the game apart early and never looked close to relinquishing control. Imagine how fearsome this would have been had Tom Trbojevic been available.
It’s been a strange tournament for Tedesco, and largely for reasons beyond his control. Though he was the only Aussie to feature in every match, he was taken off early in lots of the games and probably played fewer minutes than several players. When others were racking up tries late on, he was often already in the showers.
But when he got 80 minutes, he was exceptional. It was a fair decision on performances in international footy this year to give the Golden Boot to Joey Manu, and you could make the argument that Joseph Suaalii had a better overall tournament too. But cometh the hour, cometh the kid from Camden.
This is very much one for those of us in the ground, but I hope you’ll indulge me: this was a great event. The World Cup organisers have taken a lot of flak over the last six weeks over subjects as wide-ranging as attendances, in-goals and surfaces, but they pulled off the big moments.
It was a big crowd, they were highly engaged throughout and, crucially, constantly given something to do. The Wheelchair Final on Friday night had all the poetry and pageantry – quite literally, in fact, with the official World Cup poet performing the tournament poem that had been played on the screens before every game in person – and felt like a big night out in the middle of Manchester.
If you were a non-rugby league fan, casual eventgoer type, the sort that rarely touches our sport in the UK, you got everything and more.
When the trophy was handed out, they brought on the Wheelchair and Women’s champions alongside the Men’s, creating a clear parity between the three comps, with Latrell Mitchell seen congratulating Seb Bechara, the Wheelchair Golden Boot, and Caitlan Johnston sharing the Indigenous flag with Josh Addo-Carr. They like to talk about togetherness a lot, the World Cup team, and it felt like they nailed that moment.
Heather Small, the lead singer of Manchester act M People (and a former rugby league wife, having been married to Shaun Edwards in the 1990s) performed at half-time as Kevin Sinfield arrived at the stadium to finish one of his frankly ridiculous charity runs, and they wheeled her out again at the end to create a party atmosphere. People hung about after the end of the game, which as anyone who has attended major finals know, never, ever happens.
From soup to nuts, it worked. I hope they all get a big rest now. I need one too.