What do the Kangaroos represent?

Selection fights and Origin threats

It feels like every year now, we get a story about a top line player who is considering shunning the Kangaroos in order to play for their heritage in the summer international season.

Brian To’o made headlines back in 2022 when he first declared that he would play for the Kangaroos at the end of season delayed World Cup over in England, at the behest of his parents, before reneging on that initial declaration later that year to front up for Samoa alongside all his best friends.

From January 2022:

“I would love to represent Samoa in the World Cup, and it will be my first one if I end up making the team,” To’o told the Herald.

“But my parents want me to tick off the box playing for Australia and that’s something I’ve got to take into consideration. I’ll most likely play for Australia if I get chosen.”

Now I’m going to ignore the somewhat problematic nature of effectively reducing the Kangaroos into a PlayStation trophy achievement on a career mode save, but that’s the reality the Kangaroos have created for themselves. A lack of fixtures and visibility for the team to the general population has severed the link to community and reduced them to a mere background figure in the landscape of rugby league. It’s quite rare for the number one ranked team in the world to be the side character in the story, and yet here we are.

Australia beat England in the 2017 World Cup final 6-0 thanks to a Boyd Cordner try in the first half. In between that game and the first game of the 2021 World Cup (a 42-8 victory over Fiji in Leeds in mid-October 2022), the Kangaroos played a grand total of…four fixtures, two each in 2018 and 2019, with a global pandemic in the middle.

The pandemic presented the perfect excuse for those in charge of the sport to quietly suffocate the international game in favour of their interests in the real money spinners (State of Origin). It’s no secret that while Origin brings in seismic amounts of dosh through broadcasting arrangements and gate receipts, international rugby league is, by comparison, the sullen younger sibling who insists on private cello lessons halfway across town at great expense to the parents.

The Pacific Championships are funded by the NRL and the Australian federal government. Back in 2023 the Albanese government committed $7 million over the subsequent two years for the end of season tournament, with then-Kangaroos coach Mal Meninga citing development of rugby league in the lead up to the 2026 World Cup as a driving factor.

The 2021 World Cup, played a year later than the branding would suggest, is the clearest example of the shifting attitude towards the international game, given it took one sneeze in a pub in Huddersfield for the NRL to effectively boycott the tournament, citing “health concerns”. While I don’t doubt there were players that had legitimate qualms and would have opted out of competing if given the choice, it felt too rushed a decision to threaten to postpone or “we’ll take our ball and go home.”

I have little doubt that had the tournament gone ahead in 2021 with the caveat of players opting in, that while you may have gotten some players who chose to not go, the tournament may have been in danger of actually being competitive, but I digress. The NRL and ARLC hold all the power in the support so whatever they say goes, and Australia’s thorough pantsing of the likes of Scotland and Italy would have to wait twelve months.

Back to the original impetus for this article, the likes of Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow (who has represented Samoa before), Tino Fa’asuamaleaui (who has represented Samoa before) and Payne Haas (who has not) are all reportedly considering “abandoning” the Kangaroos end of season Ashes Tour of England (for which they would all be surely picked) in favour of representing Toa Samoa in the Pacific Championships.

During my research for this I made the mistake of clicking on a Courier Mail comments section and…well you get the idea. I hope the trio mentioned above enjoy handing in their Australian passports and obtaining work visas…

I’ve written before, several times in fact, my thoughts on the balance between those that play State of Origin and then choose to represent a Tier 2 nation internationally when Brian To’o officially declared for Samoa in 2022, citing the duelling identities of representing your community (western Sydney) and culture (Samoa).

The discourse has predictably gone circular around this issue, with former Blues coach Brad Fittler putting his hand up to lead the yearly chorus of “if you play Tier 2 you should be banned from Origin” rhetoric, as if that would solve anything.

The problem, as I mentioned above, is twofold. One, yes the Kangaroos just don’t have the same cut through to the generation of young players coming through that they did 20 years ago, and that’s largely down to, again repeating myself here, a sheer lack of fixtures. I’m not professing to know the solution here, but a few token games at the end of a seven month season where half the players end up needing surgery anyway really isn’t enough to rebuild the mythos in the jersey.

The other aspect is something that the Kangaroos can do nothing about, and that’s the rise in Pasifika representation across the NRL to the point where a lot of these players grow up together in the same community, attending the same churches and gatherings, playing the same junior football together, growing up together. It’s no different to the enclaves of Italians and Greeks and Lebanese and Vietnamese scattered throughout Sydney.

Samoa making the World Cup final would have been an unthinkable concept not ten years ago, and now a host of the best players in the world are counted among their diaspora. Even if you want to be cynical and point to the intention of the draw of the last World Cup being to lob England a supposed softball by having Australia and New Zealand on the same side of the draw, the point is a Tier 2 nation run on hopes and dreams shattered the mirage of English hope thanks to an outside back kicking a field goal.

You know what else drives this? Success.

Think back to when Jason Taumalolo made the call to defect full time from New Zealand to Tonga. Not only did his stature as the best player in the game at the time help attract others to do the same for Tonga, but then the snowball effect began, culminating in their famous defeat of Australia in November 2019.

Samoa is the same prototype, just later, and with a group instead of one central figure.

When To’o, Jarome Luai and Stephen Crichton all declared they would play for Samoa in the World Cup in 2022 (at the time you have to remember they were all real chances of being picked in an extended Australian squad at least), that was Samoa’s formative moment from Tier 2 also ran into genuine international mover and shaker. They cited the Taumalolo example, as well as the leadership of elder statesmen like Junior Paulo and Josh Papalii, when deciding to represent the island nation.

Since that moment, more and more players have swung or are considering the move, like the headline trio in this article, but also guys like Murray Taulagi and Jeremiah Nanai, who were both in the Kangaroos squad for that World Cup before representing Samoa later, or Roger Tuivasa-Sheck, who chose Samoa over NZ on his return to rugby league.

A small part of me also wonders what it would have been like for the Samoan players in the Australian squad during the World Cup seeing the scenes and the groundswell of support the Samoan team garnered on their run to the final. I don’t doubt there was a definite element of FOMO in regard to being on the other side of the fence on that one.

There’s been a lot of sneering rejection of the notion of Kevin Walters being appointed the Kangaroos coach, namely from people who, in my mind, completely miss the point of what being a representative footy coach should actually be about.

Is it jobs for the boys? Yeah, sure, but who really cares? Rugby league in an international context is uniquely positioned because of the cream at the top and the expectations associated with everyone below.

Coaching a team like Tonga or Samoa is all about reconnecting players to their ancestral homeland. The motivation of family and history is far more powerful than any tactician’s whiteboard spewing woke nonsense like overlaps and block plays.

If your issue with the Kangaroos is that players don’t seem to care, then wouldn’t someone like Kevin Walters be the perfect candidate to try and shift that notion? Maybe it’s a sociocultural problem that’s beyond fixing, but getting in everyone’s favourite uncle to razz the fellas up for a couple of weeks and beat the living shit out of a few Poms will be a nice entree to the summer if nothing else.

My read on this from afar is that Walters is passionate and cares about the job, which isn’t to say Mal Meninga didn’t but sometimes a fresh voice is needed. The people that extrapolate his time as Broncos coach with this appointment are misidentifying the requirements of the role. This isn’t a club role, he doesn’t have to be the mastermind behind tactics seven days a week. This is a glorified camp counsellor, but with elite athletes and lots of beer.

To provide a cross-sport example, look at the Socceroos. Soccer is a more tactically dependent sport than rugby league but the tenets of international play are largely the same. Ange Postecoglou is perhaps Australia’s most successful footballing export (unless you ask Daniel Levy that question), and yet he was truly awful as the Socceroos manager because he overthought the role, his intensive and painstakingly detail-oriented ethos falling flat when dealing with a country of players who have made a living on bringing Tony Pulis’ Stoke City ball to the international stage.

On the flip side you have Graham Arnold, a manager who could often be described as turgid or boring during his time with Sydney FC, but as a national team manager, a great fit, because he was nothing if not an emotional leader, not bothering with tactics and instead telling the boys to go out there and kick the shit out of the opposition, and bringing a few Scotsmen along for the ride. The enduring image of Australia’s World Cup run to me isn’t the Mathew Leckie goal against Denmark, or the scenes at Federation Square, but rather the moment that spawned it all, in the middle east against Peru, when Andrew Redmayne saved the winning penalty and the camera panned to Arnold mobbed by his staff, his fist raised high in elation above the scrum. That man understood that to lead Australia in international football was about leading an army, not cosplaying as Johan Cruyff’s Clockwork Orange Dutch team.

Ok soccer tangent done.

Reports out of Redfern have indicated Cameron Murray, who has been sidelined all year with a torn Achilles suffered in preseason, is training hard in a desperate bid to make the Ashes tour. Ignoring the fact that I’d probably advise against picking a guy who probably won’t play any first grade football this season, that’s the mentality we supposedly want from the Kangaroos.

Messing with the State of Origin eligibility rules and the tiers of international rugby league won’t fix anything. It is possible that the Kangaroos jersey and everything associated with it is irreparably damaged to the point that it will become increasingly rare for those with ancestral homes elsewhere to choose to don the green and gold.

But if anyone can get a bit of that magic and spice back into the jersey, then Kevin Walters isn’t a bad first call.