Was a joy to watch the likes of Slater, GI, Smith, Lockyer, JT, Hayne etc on our home ground. If only they were wearing cherry and white

Thats because he's an arrogant little s***, but one heck of rugby player

Do you think we stand any chance of signing one of the top quality aussies,considering the recent fall out from Melbourne.If anybody is available surely the link with MM and the fact we are playing so well must make us a more lucrative prospect than other S.L teams.and if they are available do we want them or do we stick with the homegrown.For a youth player at wigan at the minute must be pretty exciting to have a man with the caliber of MM coaching the fitness regime of Mark Bitcom and the teachings of the Wigan way from Mr Wane some of our youngsters could be taken from really good players. to the next level into tomorrows superstars..hopefully in a few years there could be a thread on an aussie forum talking about some of our players in the same respect as one Billy Slater on here.

We dont stand a chance of signing any of them, even with MM

Sadly nobody does, and never really has. Even the days of Meninga, Lewis, Kenny, Sterling were against the backdrop of it being the Aussie close season. Fact is the top Aussie players won't give up rep football, earn more money over there, have miles better lifestyle, are real celebrities, get taken seriously by the media and generally view their competition as superior.

It's a real shame, but it's never going to happen.

Our best bet is always going to be either youngsters (increasingly difficult as the best i.e. Dugan, Widdop etc have space made for them), Old timers, or 'fringe players'. A slightly better bet is NZ players, but only from the rep football perspective, the rest of the points apply just as much to them, hence while we'll never see a Benji Marshall, Keiran Foran, Isaac Luke, Adam Blair etc in their prime either.

Losing Sam Burgess was a bad thing for Super League to (though probably a good thing for England) and I hope for the standards of our competition it doesn't start a trend.

Often wonder what things would look like had News Limited won the Super League war and we'd had the proposed ESL v ASL play off type things.

I dont think it is a bad thing for super league, the aussies are actually beginning to look at us, as though we produce some quality youngsters which we do . Look at young elliot whitehead, i dont think he would of got the chance to play, if burgess was still at bradford?

I think its good, it shows that the youth of the game is actually going somewhere.

Not nearly far enough, if your thinking it will help us against the Australians

Its like Usain Bolt vs the other runners, even on an off day they will probably beat us, if they are on form they will run away with it every time.

The way the Aussies look at us is probably the same way we look at France, they always give us a game and are a team of good players but they will never beat us.

Let's all give up now then.

The aussies are good, but they arn't un-beatable, and it gives us something to strive towards. The production of young players at the minute is brilliant, how you can put a negative spin on that is beyond me!

It's not all doom and gloom but we also have to be realistic about our chances when we play against Aus.

They have a far superior squad which consists of numerous big game/world class players. We don’t have that as we seem to range from having the sublime players like Burgess to the dreadful players like Gardner. Aus don’t have that range in their squad and that’s not being full of doom and gloom it’s just being realistic.

England in the recent past i.e 2006 have proven that they can beat Aus in a one off game and also NZ in the WC final have proven they can beat Aus in one off games as well. The difference on those days were that they both had squads filled with good players like Gleeson, Senior, Carney etc but they had a world class HB in Sean Long who out played the Aussies for that one off game. The same goes for the NZ WC winning side with good players like Tommy L, Feind, Hohaia, Blair etc but a world class HB in Marshall. When you’ve got a special player like that you’ve always got a chance in the game.

Those one off games have never been a problem IMO the problems come when we start to play group tournaments like the Tri nations etc as realistically we may win one game vs Aus but we are never going to win two against them in straight succession and points based tournaments don’t work well for us.

Sadly the best we can hope for is getting a competitive squad with a world class HB and then mugging the Aussies in a final sadly. That may sound sad or defeatist but I can’t see it happening any other way and bar the odd freak results history shows it to be true.

To win the World Cup or 4N you only have to beat the Aussies once in the final. Its winning the Ashes were we will come unstuck. Until the Ashes is won we wil never be No.1. After all the last time we won the World Cup we only beat them once.

he's not bad rather have mathers

He didnt look so great against the Bronc's. Izzy made him look very wooden a couple times and out stripped him on one of their tries.

shhhhh he's the best attacker around therefore he's the best defender around, haven't you heard?

Slater's the most entertaining full back around at the moment. The very best Aussie fullbacks are a joy to watch. My favourite fullback though was Lockyer - just class all round.

When you look at the calibre of the Aussie outside backs (and add in a couple of class halfbacks for good measure) its absolutely no wonder that England can't compete often with them. Compariing them with England's options 1-5 is frankly a very disturbing thing to do. Best not thought about really.