D4mo78 wrote:
The guy does an interview and gets asked a question. He answers it and it gets posted on a message board. People complain about what he said.
The Black Pearl has given his opinion, which he's qualified to do given his standing in the game. We are behind the Aussies, and seem to be slipping even more. I agree that Ellery should be involved in improving the game. Guys like him, Edwards, Davies, Robinson should be used more. The Aussies continue to tap into the knowledge of our greats. We let them wander off
Nobody is bagging Ellery - he's correct of course. The general drift of the thread is "we all know this". My own opinion is that the game here is a product that's sold to people rather than an attempt to generate great rugby league teams. The Championship can be very entertaining to watch, two teams of equal intensity levels and reasonable skills can make a good game to watch. However, you aren't going to beat the Aussies with a team from the Championship.
Football should teach us an important lessons - if you fluff the ego of a certain few British "stars", allow floods of overseas players fill the league and then have no structure to the game you play you get the situation where you can beat Aussie club sides in a one off but when you get 13 Englishmen toegther it's like they all brought their white canes with them when they try and play together.
As it was pointed out during the Germany - Holland match the other night, the Germans failed miserably and didn't even get out of their group at the last Euros, so they went away and re-thought their entire footballing philosophy and national team structure - 2 years later they got close to the WC final and now they are comfortable favourites for the Euors and look awesome. This is something England are utterly incapable of, we have no national structure or formation to the game.
We are quick to talk about how "ordinary" many aussie players seem when they come to England - that's not the point - they usually look ordianry because they are required to play with a blindfold on as they have no clue what the rest of their English teamates are doing.
It's the same in League. We've been banging on for decades how you can take pretty much any 13 Aussies and they will know how to play together - you add high quality players to that mix and you have a team we simply can't beat. It's a fact. We haven't yet gotten to grips with at a coaching or administrative level in this country. We spend far too much time fiddling with the PTB interpretation tying to make the game "look" nicer on tele to plebs who don't understand what RL is all about.
The irony of what Ellery says - and the point I pulled him up on, was that in 92 we got closest to beating them in a series mathematically since 1970 and never that close since (although I still think we were actually closer in 90 - but hey). And of course we know back then there was only one team in the competition and in the famous Melbourne battering we handed out the entire pack came from Wigan. They knew each other, they were good players, they were a great team and they were used to winning. Add a couple of brilliant individuals from other clubs and we were at our most competitive.
Get a consistant playing model, implement it, set expectations for individual skill lelve in key criteria that fit the model and watch us become better at international level.
FWIW I thought the last Origin game was turgid. It was more conservative than the Bullingdon club. A rugby ball would move faster through my colon than it did around that pitch.
