Australian Clubs had won the last 3 WCCs including a Manly win over Leeds if it escaped your attention.

That Manly win came when they came over 2 weeks before and played a warm up game. The Manly coaching staff and players made a conscious decision not to do that this time. They considred their preparation would be sufficient to beat Leeds. They were wrong.

Maybe they should have consulted you as you clearly know about how to prepare for a WCC than Geoff Toovey and his team.

Or perhaps they decided that coming over two weeks early and playing a warm up game would have been too disruptive to their preparations for the (more important) NRL season, so they would risk playing the game without a warm up.

In a one off match? there is no question. Would they be able to play with that intensity for a full season? Probably not, but then not even Manly play with full intensity every week.

If they were that good they wouldnt need to pick and choose.

Pick and choose what?

When they were ready to play RL. If the NRL is this competition of ubermensch where games as intense as fridays nights are played every week as some people pretend then two weeks before the season starts Manly would be ready to play and beat whatever lowly SL opposition is put in front of them.

Im interested to know what you actually think Manly will do over the next 2 weeks which is going to raise their performance levels so much that would have been damaging to have done 2 weeks ago, especially when we remember that whatever level of performance Manly hit they will apparently be able to perform to for the next 7 months uninterrupted.

Any team, however good they are, needs game time to be ready for competition. The NRL is more important to any Aussie team, so their preparations will be focused on that rather than the WCC. It's really not difficult.

So the NRL team chooses to enter the WCC unprepared and then, when they lose, their apologists moan that they were unprepared while adding the caveat that if they'd been prepared they would've won easily.

FFS!

You’re of the opinion that quite a few SL teams, four or five you say, could compete in the NRL whereas I don’t think any of those would make the top eight in the NRL.

I suppose it all depends on what you mean by competing, Cronulla compete, but, they’ll never win jack.

So they are going to play one game between now and the start of the NRL and that will be the magical cure all, the silver bullet which takes Manly from the team which was beaten by Leeds to the ubermensch of NRL champions.

Is there a reason they couldnt have played a game last week? Or would being 'ready' now mean they would struggle for the next 7 months?

I think all 4 would be close and we would probably see at least two of those make the 8. Do you really think Newcastle last year were comfortably better than Wire and Wigan were in the regular season?