England’s World Cup test against Tonga will show where power really lies in rugby league

Two games into the men’s World Cup and the tournament is already overflowing with colour. As if the biggest Test crowd in Sydney for more than 50 years was not enough cause for celebration, Australia and New Zealand served up one of the great international games of modern times, with the Kangaroos edging a thriller on the opening night.

But the stories do not end there. Samoa’s rise as a league powerhouse continued with a record win against France on Friday, with their passionate and united Pasifika fanbase fuelling the energy for a tilt at a second consecutive final. Tonga and Papua New Guinea will continue the theme of national pride and unforgettable noise this weekend.

The decision several years ago from some of the NRL’s best players to honour their Pacific heritage and play for nations such as Samoa and Tonga rather than Australia and New Zealand has led us to a point where there is now a bigger pool of contenders to win the World Cup. An overarching lesson perhaps that bold decisions today can lead to brighter outcomes tomorrow.

Spare a thought for the English game in all of this, though. England has felt like the long lost European cousin whose invite to the party has gone missing in the post. While all the fun is going on elsewhere, the supposed grownups are upstairs arguing yet again, after Super League missed the NRL’s deadline of Thursday to agree an historic partnership between the leagues.

The discussion around why and what happens next is for another day but in England it has cast a shadow over what has felt a pretty low-key buildup. With the tournament tucked away behind a paywall on television, you would be forgiven for not even knowing there is a World Cup taking place at all despite a new-look national team entering the fray on Saturday with a chance to make a statement.

Such is the truncated format this year, England are in must-win territory from the start when they face a tricky test against Tonga. Win, and passage through to the semi-finals should be safe given what is to follow. But slip up, and they may well be relying on results elsewhere – and a favour from Samoa who beat them in the semis in 2022 – to progress.

That makes their opening game in Perth intriguing enough. But so too does the narrative around England slipping beneath Samoa and Tonga in the pecking order. European rugby league already feels like a distant second; failure to reach the semi-finals for England this year would reinforce that thought.

In a bid to counter that, Brian McDermott has promised England will try to do things differently. Last year’s Ashes felt like a missed opportunity – the Kangaroos were not tested or stretched enough. McDermott has been abundantly clear that to beat the best at international level, you cannot simply expect to meet fire with fire: you need to mix things up.

“It’s definitely been different, I’m not going to tell you all the tricks of what we’ve got planned but it’s been different and enjoyable,” said England’s captain, George Williams. “The group have all bought into what he wants us to do and hopefully you’ll see that when we play against Tonga. I won’t give too much away but we’ll do some stuff you might not have seen before.”

That is perhaps a discreet admission from Williams that England’s tactics in recent years have not met the grade. McDermott has kept his gameplan secret but there are clues in his team selection: more mobile, agile forwards who can promote second-phase rugby and bring an exciting backline into the game.

With the world’s best centre in Herbie Farnworth, try-scoring phenomena Dom Young and Zach Eckersley on the wings and an eye-catching back row pair of Junior Nsemba and Kai Pearce-Paul, England clearly have the talent to entertain. They will need to contend with a boisterous pro-Tongan crowd in Perth as well as a Mate Ma’a side which possesses physicality aplenty.

Williams was brave enough to admit that “Tonga have got a stacked team so we’re underdogs, but we’ll embrace that tag”. McDermott normally keeps his cards close to his chest but he broke rank this week and insisted this group, together in Australia for just a week, have the potential to achieve something special. They must be faultless from minute one to do that.

England may have dispatched Samoa and Tonga with relative ease on home soil since the last World Cup, but their shock defeat to the former in the semi-finals four years ago felt like a seismic moment for both the rise of Pasifika rugby league, and the fading of England into the shadows.

Super League’s failure to agree an NRL deal has risked setting the European game back even further, but victory for England this weekend would provide some optimism. As has been the case so many times in recent years, it is over to the players to deliver that much-needed shot in the arm.