Briscoe is capable of some brilliant things, but he still needs to learn to read the game a bit. I dont think he did too much wrong tonight though. He was left in no mans land a few times in defence and never even got a sniff of a chance in attack. He carried the ball ok off our line.

Disagree. Briscoe is good enough, he didn't play well tonight but neither did plenty of players - Tomkins was terrible but he and Briscoe are clearly good enough. Chase was much, much worse than Sinfield.

One of the weakest Australian teams? Give your head a wobble.


Carvell, Westwood and JJB stood up when it mattered but we shot ourselves in the foot. We've had a good overall tournament, beating the previous Four Nations holders and the World Champions and we really need to grab hold of the positives and move on. We lost but for the first time in a long long time many people thought we could beat Australia tonight.

Thurston(especially) Lockyer and Smith controlled the game with ease and untill we get some top quality half backs we're going to struggle like this.
A quality kicking game would of made a huge difference, instead it was Australia who continually pinned us back and we could never build any pressure.

Absolutely gutted but there are some positives to take from this tournament(Hammering the World and 4N champions the best) and hopefully we can bring some half backs through before the world cup in 2013.

Agree with all that, add Chase and Peacock into the mix, time for Morley to to be put out to pasture, Wilkin tried hard but isn't up to the standard required.

JJB was responsible for two glaring errors that put us out of the game when it was still a contest, after that we were never in it, he should not be considered again.

Peacock clearly wasn't fit this evening, he should have been man enough to put his hand up and withdraw. I would have rather seen Bailey play.

they just froze. they didnt play as a team which was the biggest hope going into this match. also what happened to sam. he was well marked, then just folded for the rest of the match.

That seems completely irrelevant now.

EDIT: Sorry, meant to be in reply to "mintie mouse". I'm blaming iPhone.

Tomkins was marked out of the game, in that situation Chase, Roby, Sinfield someone has to take advantage and step up but none did.

I agree with your point about not playing as a team, we were very disfunctional and that mainly falls on Sinfields shoulders, he chose some very poor options tonight and why did we persist in kicking on the 4th tackle when we were being starved of possession.

if your spine of the team 6,7,9 can't creat the moves your not going to win simple as that we never had any back moves it was just inside ball back to ruck and it never worked. o'well time to move on the RFL need to look at a mid season warm up so the spine of the team can gell for the world cup.

I thought he was generally good. I think quite a few who figured in this tournament will have pulled on the England shirt for the last time. We've got to be looking at 2013 so for me that rules out Morley, Peacock and maybe Sinfield on age. Are Chase and Heighington really better than any English born players in their respective positions? Sam (and possibly his brothers) Burgess and Sean O'Loughlin will hopefully be available. As a Wigan fan I know full well what Sam Tomkins is capable of but if he can't produce it on the biggest stage then he can't be classed as an automatic pick. On a positive Reed, Graham, Ellis, Roby look extremely good players and with players like Jones-Bishop, Cudjoe, Broughton, Charnley, Myler, Arundel, Lomax, Makinson and Clarkson coming through we certainly have a base to build on.

Just not good enough. Unlike the game at Wembley, I never once thought 'we can do this'. It was obvious after 60 seconds that it was not happening. It doesn't help when our wingers and fullback all pick the final to bottle it.

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Report: www.rlfans.com/index.php?fid=43&id=137