I’ve gone on record in the past to say that I don’t necessarily care about whether the Australian test team wins or loses for a multitude of reasons. The lack of visibility with the team, especially in the last 5-10 years, has made it harder to generate any meaningful connection to the team. That’s not necessarily to say I hope they lose, more indifference at their results.
That obviously doesn’t count when we play England, and this Ashes1 tour has me as excited for an Australian team as I have been in maybe my entire lifetime. I think the tantalising promise of seeing what a Walsh-Munster-Cleary-Grant spine is a large part of that intrigue, as well as seeing what chaotic nonsense a right side of Hudson Young, Kotoni Staggs and Mark Nawaqanitawase would get up to (hint: a lot of shenanigans).
The prevailing sentiment of people here on the home front was that the Kangaroos would, and should, put 50 on what was described as a tired and decrepit English side (not by me, because I don’t watch Super League, but by those who do). AJ Brimson was a curious omission given all the fanfare around his defection, as was regular NRL first grader Morgan Smithies, regardless of what you think of his impact as an NRL player.
I maintained an air of hesitancy around such bold claims mainly because of the realities of this being the first tour match after a month-long break for the majority of the squad, with a spine that hadn’t played together (Cleary had never played with Walsh, who himself hadn’t played with Munster since 2023’s State of Origin series, since which a lot of water has passed under several bridges).
Australia took a bit of time to get into what I would describe as any particular flow, seemingly content to punish England through the middle and hit the edge forwards on short balls rather than sweeping out the back early, which is what we call in the business the good old fashioned “setup” for when the inevitable Cleary out the back to Walsh materialised.
News flash, once it did, England were about as equipped to deal with it as a house in Cairns would be to deal with sudden snowfall.
The avalanche broke whatever feeble resistance the creators of rugby league had meekly offered up, turning into a downhill stream of Australian chances, even accounting for frustrating profligacy for those of us bleary-eyed and peering at our screens well past 1am on the east coast (whether you observe daylight savings or wrongly don’t).
A 26-6 scoreline flatters England but really it tells the tale of a side using the first test as a honing session, and I’m loath to call this first performance anything more than the absolute baseline for this team moving forward in the rest of the series. If Kevin Walters and the Kangaroos are serious on both building as much rapport as possible with the presumed side ahead of next year’s World Cup as well as embarrassing England in front of their own fans, then no changes will be made. This is a serious tour, the Kangaroos jersey should have some aspect of reverence and rarity, changes unnecessary after the most comfortable of wins.
Some people think Mitchell Moses should come into the side for Cleary ahead of the game at Goodison Park Hill Dickinson Stadium, to which I say, boo you. But before someone inevitably cries bias, allow me to expand.
By the time the World Cup kicks off next year at Allianz Stadium in Sydney, Moses will be 32, and Cleary 28. Cleary is coming off one of his “quieter” club seasons from a success standpoint that resulted in him making his sixth consecutive preliminary final and winning Halfback of the Year, all while playing in more games than Moses has managed in the last two seasons combined. The reality is Moses just hasn’t stayed healthy, and while he’s obviously in the upper echelon of playmakers in the NRL, it hasn’t translated to much success for the Eels (who have won 10 of their 21 matches he’s played the last two years). Is that a harsh way to assess Moses? Maybe, but the fact is that stuff matters when it comes to winning representative caps, especially when the halves are maybe the most stacked position for Australia (Tom Dearden is the new Ben Hunt De Facto Middle Forward Tribute Act, and Ethan Strange is wearing a suit).
The other argument is Cleary was…fine? Again, it was his first game in several weeks plus playing with a new fullback, as well as Munster and Grant, who he hadn’t played with since the 2021 (2022 to be pedantic) World Cup Final. I thought he kicked well and given the way people describe his attacking instincts anyway, I would imagine deferring a lot of the creativity to Walsh and Munster would be an ideal balance for the side. Cleary does the organising, Walsh attacks the space off his outside, and I actually quite liked a lot of the variations from the Kangaroos in mixing up Munster and Cleary as both first and second receivers.
Anyway, it’s a real first world problem when you’re arguing over which elite halfback you should pick while England are scraping together the remnants of the 2019 Canberra Raiders.
Comfortable could also be used to describe the ruck at Wembley, with the amount of players that seemingly fell asleep in the play the ball area. I don’t want to talk too out of turn about the state of the Super League and the game in England as a whole, but if this is the standard of refereeing they’re accustomed to then…I prefer not to speak.
I don’t know what was more nonsensical, the constant pleading from the referee (whose name I shan’t be bothering to learn in hopes I never have to see him again) that the players needed to be quicker in the ruck (your job is to penalise their illegality, not simply point it out for the benefit of us at home), or the arduous and now prehistoric review process sending up clear tries because the referee was too scared of the bright lights to make a call live. People may not have liked the NFL-style auto-review post-score system the NRL has introduced with the Bunker, but it sure as shit beats reviewing Angus Crichton’s first try for reasons such as “I can’t do my job.”
The first game of this series was very much a business trip for the Kangaroos. With Grant Atkins patrolling the ruck and the implied increase in chemistry across the spine after their first run out together, I’d be tipping a much more clinical and swashbuckling performance in Game Two.
There are far too many Ashes concepts now, please eliminate three.