Having bet the house on Hull KR hero Mikey Lewis being the problem that Australia could not solve, England coach Shaun Wane has retreated home to Wigan to ponder whether he should have stuck rather than twisted. Dropping Harry Smith for the Ashes opener, and favouring treble-winner Lewis to partner captain George Williams in the halves, was surprising but understandable. Lewis, the player of the match in the Super League Grand Final, was in the form of his life. But the Williams-Lewis combination struggled to open up Australia. If they fail again on Saturday in Liverpool, Wane’s dream of winning the Ashes will be over.
“Our last plays disappointed me most,” said Wane after the 26-6 defeat at Wembley. “They outkicked us.” It’s rare anyone outkicks Wigan player Smith. Lewis mixed up his kicks under the arch, but very little troubled Australia. The best attacking kick was a 40-20 from replacement hooker Jez Litten when England trailed by three scores. Even then, Williams fumbled close to the line and five seconds later Reece Walsh had got to the halfway line.
By making a solid if unspectacular Kangaroos debut at Wembley, winger Mark Nawaqanitawase became only the fourth Australian to be capped at union, sevens and league. So how did his first two weeks with the Kangaroos compare to a Wallabies tour? “Any kind of Test format is very similar: the buildup, the professionalism, the whole aspect of it,” the Olympian told me while still in his kit an hour after the game. “It’s very enjoyable. The atmosphere is amazing and the quality of players you come up against. Everything’s quite intense. What you’ve got to do to get selected is right up there. It’s pretty special. I thought: ‘I’m living the dream.’”
Fifth and last
With so much elite sport available, people in London and the south-east need a winning or exciting team to get behind. England have been neither of those, finding a way to lose every single game within the TfL network since Country House by Blur was still in the top 40. They have been blown away, gambled in a grind and lost, outclassed, had hearts broken by Shaun Johnson and Stephen Crichton, and now had their bubble burst by Angus Crichton. And yet, the crowd of 60,812 at Wembley was the largest Ashes attendance ever in England and the biggest to watch the national team outside a World Cup. While England haven’t won in the capital since the 1995 World Cup opener, Australia haven’t lost from Wembley to Watford, The Stoop to Stratford, since then. No wonder their fans packed the lower bowl at Wembley’s southern end; they knew what was coming. Wane rightly called it “torture”.
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