Very true, with the large increases in the NRL salary cap year after year and England’s good showing in the final, I expect a few more of the England squad to be playing in the NRL in the next year or two.

Jermaine McGillvary's value will have gone off the scale after his efforts in the WC.
Along with Widdop, England's 2 stand out performers.
Gale also improved as the tournament went on and perhaps if he had been given the no 7 shirt and chance to find his feet at international level, things may have been a little different.
Left centre was our biggest issue though and with our opposition knowing that our left edge was so impotent, it made their defending somewhat easier.

whats in it for bennett now going forward?

is he really interested in winning the series next year against new zealand??

and by the time the word cup comes round its another 4 years so i think he is odds on to go.

betts maybe step up for now? not sure who else would take the job from england anyway

Think left centre could be less of a problem next year, with Liam Sutcliffe finally finding his best position at LC and Oliver gildart aswell coming through. Also as most people have been saying Shelton had his best season ever a real wingers centre and not even in squad.

Bennett is a great coach one of the greatest, but some of his selections as already stated ultimately cost us the tournament, we have the players but he preferred not to use them in preference mainly to NRL players, T burgess heighington no where near good enough, cuthbertson wastly superior to both of those but bennet does not like his style of play (natural footballers). Yesterday we just lacked a player our two who could just produce a moment of magic to prize open the defence. A proper left centre would have been a start, the underuse of Stefan Ratchford over the poor Lomax.
The ingredients were there we just to use them wrong or not use them.

Hull Daily Mail had a thought provoking article the other week, explaining that the new NRL deal gives a minimum salary of about £69k and an average wage of £200k.

They used the example of someone like Scott Taylor being on approx £80-100k and therefore being able to double his wages by being just a squad player in the NRL. Good for England's development but worrying for SL as i'm not seeing masses of talented youngsters to replace our already dwindling nunber of big name stars.

I see that as a good thing
If sl player goes over there for a higher wage other than the money the benefit is to be trained and coached at the highest level, they either make it in the NRL and bolster the England team like Sam burgess and widdop or they don't make it and come back to SL and grind out a decent living, everyone wins

If they are good enough and wasn't it enough they will make it over there

The Ryan Hall fingertip no try in 2014 in Australia?

It’s completely realistic that any England player could double their salary by going to the NRL. I don’t know why any of them would stay in Super League, the salary cap has risen so quickly, It’s gone from;
2006 $3.6 million
2010 $4.3 million
2014 $6.3 million
2018 $9.4 million

Not as straightforward as just about money though. It's a huge thing to move your family to the other side of the world. In McGillvery's case his young lad is at Man City's academy so wouldn't want to move him from there. Wife's and girlfriends aren't all stay at home spending the credit cards like footballers WAGS and have jobs and careers too.

indeed , money not everything, sometimes family is more important and alot that go over dont settle... joe wardle one recent case

Liam Watts turned down Newcastle Knights this year, which I believe to be not wanting to be apart from his kids

If the RFL raised the salary cap by another £1m, how many team's would struggle to raise revenue to accommodate the expenditure

Probably all but Saints, Leeds, Wigan, Warrington and possibly Hull. Which is part of our problem. One reason why SL quality isn't great is that we're placing all the responsibility for dealing with income inequality on the richer clubs to avoid spending, rather than on the poorer clubs to raise their incomes and spend more. There needs to be an increase, and it needs to be quick, because the Aussies will be looking harder at our remaining international class players now, and they've plenty of cash to wave around.

I can't believe some of the rubbish on here about Bennett. That is the first time we have competed in a must win game against them since 2003, when the Kangaroos brought probably their worst squad in 30 years to England. The reason we lost that game is that we just didn't have enough quality in 1, 6 and 7 to create tries. We've heard for years that our pack was as good/better than theirs - this time it actually was. Give England any one of Slater, Morgan and Cronk and we'd have won that.

What Bennett really changed was defence. Whilst we bemoan our lack of creativity etc, Australia, who had been scoring for fun were only able to manage one try, and for most of the second half were almost no threat at all. I have NEVER seen an England team do that to them in defence, including the times we've beaten them since 1982.

Also, re Widdopp I think its unfair to say he isn't a stand off. He was basically the only attacking playmaker and always on the right. No surprise he struggled to get killer passes away and took some dumb risks at times.

Bennett was conservative, but in the end Betts probably picked most of the fringe players like Brown, and he wouldn't have picked either Bateman in the centres or Heighington at all if he'd had clearly better options available. Does anyone seriously think if he had a left centre as good as Watkins on the right that he wouldn't have picked him? Or played someone other than Gale/Brown if they were standouts?

Personally whilst gutted for the loss, I couldn't be prouder of the effort we put in. That's the third game I've been to in Brisbane vs Australia, and the first where we looked like we belonged on the same field as them.

James Graham spoke up for Wayne Bennett at the post match interviews. That is good enough for me.