wanted with English grandparents to play in 2017 World Cup. You cannot be any worse than the Pommies currently playing in the England side.

Id say the opposite, this is the worst Australia team I've seen for a very long time. Take Smith/Cronk and Thurston out (they're all 30+) and your bang average.

I thought overall, the NRL based English players, apart from Graham were poor. The Burgess twins were especially terrible.

But as Dave Woods said on the tv commentary, the Aussies keep producing more top quality talent to replace the ones that retire.

While I take your point, they have guys like Morgan, Hunt, Milford, Freind waiting in the wings. Not to mention those even younger like Cleary and Ashley Taylor.

And whilst I had my rant earlier about the issues with the game over here, our very top 17 should still be doing better than that today.

For me, John Wilkins comments before the game about it being 'a privilege' to play against the Aussies sums it up for me.... Its almost as though simply being on the pitch against them means 'you've made it'. It should be a privilege to wear your countries shirt regardless of the opposition - instead of being in awe of them, we should be going out to hammer em. If we'd approached the first 73 minutes of the game with the same mongrel as the last 7, we might have had a different game.

That was the worst thing for me- we had no mongrel attitude.

We should have been flying in from tackle 1.

Taking the ball up at speed not standing still.

We looked like a training game at times.

The aussies were poor and there for the taking. 3 times we dropped the ball in great try scoring positions.

As usual they were clinical which is how they win, just doing the basics more consistently than we do.

Error count must have been sky high for us.

I'd agree with that, and that's why this defeat is especially hard to take. No Aussie side can ever be described as bang average, they are the best players in the world, but by their standards this isn't a vintage Kangaroo side by any means. GI, Smith and Thurston (and to a lesser extent Cronk) are some of the finest players ever to pull on the green and gold, but they are all the wrong side of 30, and the rest of the team are nothing special. Yet we still can't get close.

Cronk would not even make the top ten scrum halfs in my lifetime. He's a good player but not an all time great. More Craig gower that a langer or sterling.

i'm not going to mention the game as such because no matter how average the Aussies are they are light years ahead of us, however on Cronk I'm a little surprised about the reaction to him as I'm sure if you asked CS JT OR GI who pulls the strings for the Aussies and infact QLD they will tell you it's Cooper Cronk.

I've never really been convinced of the Australian pack since 1992/94, their back line was a hell of a lot stronger when they had the likes of Slater/Minichello, Gasnier/Hodges/Tate/Cooper.

This team is a good team but not a good Australia team, they were there for the taking. Only GI struck fear into me out of all of them and he didn't play his best game, I'm disappointed more than anything.

Disappointed our forwards didn't get stuck into them from the off and try to snap them in half/gang tackle them.

Disappointed that Sam Burgess and Josh Hodgesons egos made them think they could win the game by themselves and without the halfbacks.

Disappointed that we made so many basic errors and fumbled a few try scoring opportunities, it's simple stuff but they bottled it.

Dissappointed in Sam Burgess being captain, he is a big thick bloke who is very good and runnin hard and talking hard, a captain he is not mainly due to his lack of intelligence, James Graham should have been captain.

At halfback we lacked a long kicking game, for the reason only I would have played Matty Smith alongside Williams, Matty is not better than the halfbacks on the squad but he is better at long kicking than all of them. As they say it's not about picking the best players but the best team.


I could go on but I've got to get bak to work

For average players that are not that good they seem to do well against us.
What does that make our players....?

Cronk and Thurston is the best halfback pairing in the world. I wouldn't drop either of them for anyone else at this moment in time, not Johnson, not any of the other Aussie halfbacks in the wings.

Average Aussies? LOL. What have you been smoking? They left another team's worth of world-class players at home ffs.