Red Roses promise more after Wallaroos expose 'teething issues'

As promising as the two English second rows look, they are clearly not at the same level as Stratford and Ward. Huge miss imo.

I couldn’t understand why the Australian scrum half, on seeing the ball was going to emerge quicker than she wanted, was allowed to roll the ball back into the breakdown with her hand. She did it three times that I saw, on two of those occasions there were even tv close ups of her doing it. Not only knock ons but deliberately done, yet the referee never batted an eyelid.

The spark that burns twice as bright burns half as long. Such is the case for the Roos where they came out all guns blazing and were able to keep the Roses very quiet for almost 40 minutes.

But the problem is that they had nothing behind it and once the replacements came on it was all downhill. That's not the officials getting it wrong. That's Australia simply having a lack of depth.

Once Australia was going in reverse they had no way to get themselves back into the game and the relentless power game of the Roses came to the fore as they brought all of their superior experience and depth to bear.

As a result of the Roos’ performance backpedalling, so too did the penalty count ratchet up against them because they were no longer hitting the rucks fast enough or in sufficient numbers to regain possession or halt the momentum.

The 0-3 sec ruck time is a critical threshold where the Roos simply have no answers. They were mostly kept in the 6-9 sec bracket by England once the hosts gelled and they couldn't speed up their own ball or slow down England’s

That's ultimately why the score blew out so massively and so quickly. The Roos put in a mighty shift in defence and it was one of their best ever defensive showings.

But because they couldn't do anything on the other side of the ball, it was only ever a question of when they would break. And it turns out they broke basically the moment that Pohiva went off injured since she was in every good thing up until that point.

You blame the officials when they're a symptom of the game that was played, not the cause of it. The blame entirely lies with Australia's weak pathways and a lack of high level opportunity.

The single biggest change which will bear fruit in time is the decision to promote players moving to the Premiership.

Since our ability to expand our top line competition is somewhat limited we have no choice but to look off shore and England is one of the few places that has the capacity for us to use their league for our benefit.

Given that the vast majority of the playing squad have less than 15 caps that's a severe dearth of top level experience which is why they can start so energetically and positively but ultimately fade away after only half the game has elapsed.

Fewer than 10 players have over 30 caps and only three have over 40. That's too little experience and that's why there's so little on field leadership.

It takes time for the trust and understanding between players to develop and they just don't have enough runs on the board to have acquired it yet. But they will. It's just mostly likely going to need to go beyond 2029 before we start to see some real dividends.

And therein lies the essential quandary. They need to demonstrate progress by producing constantly improving results to garner more attention and more investment. But they need more investment and more attention to achieve results.

It's a chicken and egg thing. The worst thing is that for the passages of play in games where they manage to produce decent quality it's just too fleeting and inconsistent that it gets eclipsed by all their poor passages and it's during those periods they go from near parity to abject defeat.

So it just ends up looking like they're stagnating rather than making progress. Hence the frustration. It's so obviously a psychological issue rather than an issue of skill or fitness. And unfortunately psychological issues are very difficult to fix.

The only way to ultimately escape from your own psychological constraints is simply to wake up one day and no longer allow them to control you. These women just have to decide whether they are happy to still be mediocre or whether they want to be champions.

As a group and individually they need to look within themselves and ask, “What do I want from this?” And if they either can't answer that or their answer is to be accepting of where they are at, then they have to be let go for the benefit of the program.

The destination matters just as much as the journey to get there and if you're not prepared to be increasingly demanding of yourself then perhaps you need to reflect on whether you're really doing enough for the team and therefore whether you have earned your right to be there.

You can worry about finesse and polish when you're doing the fundamentals right without having to even think about it. They're not at that level yet with still far too many handling errors and too much poor decision making and poor execution.

Playing a simplified game as they are is starting to build those fundamentals. However those fundamentals need to be built before the players end up in the national program, not once they're already in it.

The problem against opponents ranked above them is that they're so far beyond the sort of game that the Roos play that the only thing that really gives the Roos early game opportunity is their fancied opponents overplaying, which they constantly do.

England would have started more positively but for their impatience and inability to deal with the massively positive intent of the Australians in the first 20 minutes which completely disrupted their flow.

However, once the Roos slowed down because they couldn't maintain their early game intensity for the whole game, everything flipped and suddenly where the hosts had found it hard going now there was space and holes everywhere.

And similarly to how the Auckland test went 3 weeks ago their defence which had been close to parity for the first 40 collapsed after halftime with the untimely yellow card to Leonard opening up the opportunity for the Roses to fully utilize their maul which they did to devastating effect.

The Roos need to look to their discipline because they keep getting themselves penalised out of these games where they almost seem to give themselves a chance to take control but then throw it away with weak composure and/or indecision.

Conceding more than double the infringements of your opponent and having players sent off is never going to deliver you victory. And that's a product of poor on field leadership.

The vastly experienced players need to be the ones stepping up and leading by example but too often they're the ones getting penalised and sent off. It's negative leadership that puts pressure on the side that they cannot deal with whilst having to also try to handle a superior opponent.

The advent of professionalism isn't going to suddenly flip a switch and make them champions. They need to to completely shift their mindset as individuals and as a team if they want to improve.

Unfortunately, I can see how much further behind the Roos are than France and Scotland so I honestly think they'll likely lose against both sides despite having the wood over the French in their recent history and having never lost to the Scots.

History is never a reliable indicator for future results and given how much more competitive the French and Scots looked against the Kiwis and Canucks respectively, I just feel that momentum is not with the Roos right now so 0 from 3 seems a very real prospect at this point.

In reference to your NRL suggestion, that's a terrible idea. Unless anyone you might be thinking of has any kind of background in rugby, in 7s at the very least, then they will struggle as much as any convert in the men's game does.

The one constant thing that is said by every convert from NRL to rugby is that they were not prepared for how much faster rugby is and how much harder you get hit.

And the single biggest weakness that league converts have is that they don't instinctively understand what's required for rucking since they don't have anything like that in the game they know.

Rucks are a highly dynamic phase of play where as you go into contact as the ball carrier the goal is to give your side as much opportunity as possible to win the ball back by using your body positioning and placement of the ball to legally obstruct the opposition.

And if you're someone arriving after the ball carrier has been tackled then depending on your timing determines what your role is, either to go for the ball or to clean out.

Generally league converts don't know what they should be doing so they aren't effective at the breakdown and they don't usually understand what's required when going into contact with the vast majority either getting pinged for holding on or they simply knock it on in contact as they're trying to keep their hands free for the offload.

While having a good offload game is certainly a good asset, you need to understand when you should keep it alive and when to go to ground. If you've come up in rugby, you intrinsically understand this. If you haven't, then you have to learn it from scratch.

And the international stage is not the level to be learning. Everyone in national colours should simply be refining what they already have, not having to develop fundamentals of their game.

Since the team already has enough players who are having to learn and develop the basics from within the rugby ecosystem itself, adding more learners who have less knowledge is not going to produce results.