The Roar
The Roar

The Roar

EastsFootyFan

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Joined August 2015

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The only thing that has been pathetic has been the response of England’s players, media and fans. We all know only too well that if the shoe were on the other foot they’d just be telling us to suck it up and calling us sooks. But because they’re 2 nil down and had assumed they’d be 2 nil up, their born to rule attitude has them reaching for any excuse in sight for how they could be behind despite being at home and apparently the saviours of international test cricket.

UK View: 'He didn't look like a leader. He looked pathetic' - Cummins caned but Poms also skewer 'dozy' Bairstow

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Cricket
 
Jul

What an absolute load of nonsense. Bairstow had attempted the exact same thing and McCullum famously was guilty of a more blatant instance of exploiting the same rule.

The pearl clutching moralising of some over this is frankly ridiculous.

COMMENT: Cummins failed the moral test and tarnished these Ashes. He had the chance to be a legend and blew it

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Cricket
 
Jul

Turbo is made of glass more brittle than Billy Smith… just a horror run.

Blues star Tom Trbojevic forced off after three minutes - Freddy's plan B blows up in his face

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League
 
Jun

The core thing Qld have had is their spine has been consistent and largely intact. You can shift a lot of other players around, but your attack isn’t worth much without a cohesive spine. So yeah, blessed.

Origin II: Axe set to fall on Fittler after Slater’s Maroons commit Blue murder to win series as three players get sent off

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League
 
Jun

Nah, you can check my comment history. Called it as soon as I saw the team.

Origin II: Axe set to fall on Fittler after Slater’s Maroons commit Blue murder to win series as three players get sent off

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League
 
Jun

What part of that was an excuse? I was arguing some of those Qld “underdog” sides were genuinely good and undermined by objectively classy spines.

Origin II: Axe set to fall on Fittler after Slater’s Maroons commit Blue murder to win series as three players get sent off

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League
 
Jun

There’s been one or two famous series where Qld pulled it out of the fire with a team of “no names”, but for the most part a lot of those claims are beat ups. Even in the recent “worst Qld side ever” of 2020 you had Munster and DCE and a still very in form Jake Friend as the nucleus of the spine through the whole series.

Origin II: Axe set to fall on Fittler after Slater’s Maroons commit Blue murder to win series as three players get sent off

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League
 
Jun

Agreed. NSW had a horror injury run, whilst Qld were clearly blessed, but Freddy made a hard situation worse by making mind numbingly stupid decisions for his selections and sending out a side that appeared almost as if they hadn’t trained together… they were just awful

Origin II: Axe set to fall on Fittler after Slater’s Maroons commit Blue murder to win series as three players get sent off

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League
 
Jun

This is more or less the scoreline I predicted after seeing the team Freddy selected. Just a terrible spine – up there with some of our worst since the Mitchell Pearce era. Freddy was going into a must win clash against a spine that has been fairly consistent for 5 years with a new halves combination, a very out of form FB and a starting hooker that is better as a 14.

True, injuries to Cleary, Latrell, Api et al hurt a lot and Qld were relatively blessed with the good health of their spine, but there was an obvious solution in Reynolds and Walker, where you had a ready made combination.

Origin II: Axe set to fall on Fittler after Slater’s Maroons commit Blue murder to win series as three players get sent off

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League
 
Jun

I have seen that, but TBH I reckon that’s an exercise in pissing into the wind. AFL just has no chance of taking off in NZ. The fact that it has “Australian Rules” in the name just makes it a non starter to any kiwi I’ve ever met 😂

Steve Hansen claims 'NRL's a better game to watch' than 'predictable' Super Rugby, backs RA plans to 'jazz it up'

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Rugby
 
Jun

The problems with Australian Rugby are MUCH deeper than that. Heck, even during the brief flash in the pan wins by Australian SR sides that the ratings still struggle to hit average NRL levels. Even when the Tahs won in 2014 the were still only get the stadium 3/4 full for their historic home GF.

Steve Hansen claims 'NRL's a better game to watch' than 'predictable' Super Rugby, backs RA plans to 'jazz it up'

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Rugby
 
Jun

Union’s problem is that it isn’t the NRL that it loses most of its fans to anyway – many are actually converts to the AFL. The fact that Union people don’t understand this is a little mind blowing TBH.

Steve Hansen claims 'NRL's a better game to watch' than 'predictable' Super Rugby, backs RA plans to 'jazz it up'

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Rugby
 
Jun

They’ve been winning it for 50 years though – attendance rates for soccer have always been high because it’s very safe and accessible. But as someone who grew up playing soccer because I ever played League or Union, I can attest that playing a game doesn’t necessarily make you want to watch it.

Steve Hansen claims 'NRL's a better game to watch' than 'predictable' Super Rugby, backs RA plans to 'jazz it up'

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Rugby
 
Jun

The NRL isn’t the elephant in the room for Rugby – it’s the AFL. Just look where all the local talent comes from at the Swans and Lions – they’re all old union schools. You can see it in the fan bases as well. The Swans have one of the most buttoned up WASPy fan bases in the AFL because they intentionally targeted all the Union strongholds. You could quite literally chart the growth of Swans attendances as being inversely proportional to the steady decline in people going to Waratahs games.

Steve Hansen claims 'NRL's a better game to watch' than 'predictable' Super Rugby, backs RA plans to 'jazz it up'

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Rugby
 
Jun

You’re deluding yourself cookie – and it’s not just Qld; the NRL has been hitting records for attendances this year and ratings are as strong as ever. You say that league “does a good job at promoting itself” as if it were some sort of slight, but football codes are in the entertainment business fundamentally, so if your administration is not good at promoting itself and winning engagement from fans, then either you’re garbage at your job or your product is garbage – or both.

In Union’s case, I genuinely feel it’s a case of “both”. I used to watch Union as much as I watched league, but Union has descended into less a contest, and more a long committee between officials in which they spend half the game debating every pedantic ruling you can find an excuse for making – the sport feels like a game for lawyers and bureaucrats. On top of that, whereas once it was permanently behind the fox paywall, now it’s hidden on a niche streaming service – even more out of sight and out of mind. This has followed 2 decades of straggering incompetence by Rugby in Australia in which they didn’t just lose out to the NRL, but even more troublingly had the AFL gut them from the inside without RA even realising it was happening until it was too late.

Steve Hansen claims 'NRL's a better game to watch' than 'predictable' Super Rugby, backs RA plans to 'jazz it up'

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Rugby
 
Jun

I swear Trell just doesn’t have a desire to play for NSW… I reckon he’ll be ruling himself out in years to come. This is also another thing that kills the Blues – whereas Qlders would play with a missing arm if it meant pulling on the maroon, too many Blues players just seem happy to just not bother with Origin altogether.

Losing Latrell last thing Fittler needs as battered Blues try to regroup for must-win Origin showdown

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League
 
Jun

I think that’s right – which as you say gets us back to where we started and the reason for this article: that if we want to look at why international rugby league has lost its luster, then really it has a lot more to do with England (and to a certain extent the collapse of the game in France) than it does with Origin. To my mind, Origin actually demonstrates how few competitive teams you need for an engaging representative product. I am very confident that if RL had a more widespread and national presence in the UK and a history of being consistently competitive with Australia, then the RL internationals between us would easily be bigger than Origin. It’s a bit of a shame that it isn’t really… the competition between our two countries is closer in Union, but dominated heavily by England at present given the state of Union in Australia is probably even more precarious than the state of League in the UK – with one other code (the AFL) having intentionally and methodically spent the better part of the last fifteen years targeting Union’s traditional nurseries and hollowing them out whilst Union focused on a losing war with the NRL.

England’s rugby league failures are killing the international game

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League
 
Jun

This is true – although it must be said that between just Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka you’re talking about 1.8 billion people – which is several hundreds of millions more people than the entire population of Europe and South America combined.

Does Australia care about the FIFA Women's World Cup?

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Football
 
Jun

He’s fit now apparently

'They're risks': Fittler insists he's no gambler, but admits NSW selections could backfire

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League
 
Jun

“Obviously, Jarome and Mitchell are going to have to find a combination and expedite the way they work together.”

Sure Freddy, but you had a ready made alternative in Reynolds-Walker where that wouldn’t have been a problem…

'They're risks': Fittler insists he's no gambler, but admits NSW selections could backfire

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League
 
Jun

Walker had a minor strain but is back. I don’t want to say we have “no chance” but to me it seems like a risk to be sending in players with no history together in the halves to set us up for a win in Qld’s home and against a spine that is much more settled.

NSW Origin II team: Hynes pays price for dip in form, Moses, Cook recalled, Pangai punted, rising stars to debut

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League
 
Jun

There are of course a lot of uncertainties, but I think a lot of what people can’t understand is why Freddy wouldn’t pick players that are similarly in form to those he has picked, but already have deep combinations with eachother. Moses and Luai will be going into a must win match whilst trying to work out how to play effectively with eachother against a halves pairing that have been an almost permanent fixture for Qld since game 3 in 2018. To me, it’s for this reason that it should have been Reynolds and Walker every day of the week. Both are in sumblime form, and both have a deep understanding of how the other plays AND an established combination with Latrell, Cook and Murray. By picking Moses and Luai, we just make it much more likely that our attack will be incoherent.

NSW Origin II team: Hynes pays price for dip in form, Moses, Cook recalled, Pangai punted, rising stars to debut

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League
 
Jun

Yeah, I worry there might be a touch of the Walker-Keary problem we have at the Roosters where we signed two players that have the same style in the halves and therefore don’t work well together because they’re so similar.

NSW Origin II team: Hynes pays price for dip in form, Moses, Cook recalled, Pangai punted, rising stars to debut

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League
 
Jun

DCE and Munster didn’t have any combination when they were first paired in game 3 of 2018, and for their first game in a live series they were playing against halves that also had no combination back then (Cleary and Walker), but they’ve effectively been the starting halves in almost every game since then and so know each other reasonably well. NSW will be testing a new combination against a proven one, and doing it in a must win match.

NSW Origin II team: Hynes pays price for dip in form, Moses, Cook recalled, Pangai punted, rising stars to debut

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League
 
Jun

He absolutely has, but Reynolds and him have never been partnered in Origin. Going into a must win game with limited prep we absolutely need proven combinations.

NSW Origin II team: Hynes pays price for dip in form, Moses, Cook recalled, Pangai punted, rising stars to debut

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League
 
Jun
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