ON last week’s League Express Podcast I floated a theory that Australia might be in danger of losing this match because so many of their players had come onto the market on 1st November as their contracts expire at the end of 2027.

According to the NRL regulations, a player with a year remaining on his contract who hasn’t extended it with his existing club can begin negotiations with other clubs from that point.

Eleven members of the Kangaroos squad, out of 23 players, are in this position.

I therefore wondered aloud whether their focus on the World Cup semi-final might be affected by telephone calls from their player-managers contacting them with details of offers from NRL clubs.

However, if indeed that happened, it didn’t seem to affect the Australians one little bit, to judge from the way they put the Samoans to the sword on Sunday.

Instead it was the Samoans who played as though they were distracted.

To be fair to them, however, it was not difficult to understand why they would get riled up, as so many decisions seemed to go against them.

In particular, when they appeared to score a try that would have started to bring them back into the game after 30 minutes, when they were already 16-2 down, the Bunker disallowed the try by Stephen Crichton because of a supposed knock-on by Francis Manuleleua when he contested against Reece Walsh to catch a spiralling Jarome Luai bomb. 

The Bunker claimed that he had knocked the ball forward into Walsh as both players tried to catch it, whereas I and the TV commentators all thought that the ball had gone backwards from Manuleleua for Crichton to be able to pick it up and score.

I felt annoyed on behalf of the Samoans at that point so I can only imagine how they felt about it.

And it is tempting to engage in conspiracy theories when so many decisions during matches involving the Australians seem to go the way of the Kangaroos, although maybe the truth is that the Aussies don’t make as many mistakes as the sides they play against.

Nonetheless they pulled away with two more tries to lead 26-2 at half-time.

One of those tries was the first of a Reece Walsh hat-trick and he celebrated with an audacious backflip, landing on his feet but losing one of his boots.

It was great for the fans but not so good for Australian coach Kevin Walters, who, like the TV commentators, probably thought he had injured himself when in fact he was sitting down to put his boot back on.

In his half-time interview Walters made it plain that there would be no more backflips in the second half and Walsh did indeed stop himself from repeating the move when scoring both his second-half tries.

“That’s just Reece,” Walters told the post-match media conference. “He always brings up something you don’t expect.

“The backflip was no different. Impressive though. He did it for some sick kids. They all asked him to do a backflip if he scored a try, so you can’t really be against that when he’s putting a smile on kids’ faces.”

The truth is that I wish there were a lot more Reece Walshes playing Rugby League all over the world, putting a smile on all our faces.

The Samoans’ defeat can at least be partially explained by looking at some of the statistics for the match.

They conceded nine penalties to the Aussies’ four; they made nine errors to the Aussies’ seven; they gave away four set restarts to the Aussies’ two; and they had a player foolishly sin binned. They missed 50 tackles to the Aussies seven, while the Australians made nine line-breaks compared to the Samoans’ one.

And that was probably the most crucial statistic of all.

And here is another statistic that points to the success of this World Cup. The total attendances so far amount to 370,277, which gives us an average of 21,781.

With a crowd in excess of 50,000 expected for Sunday’s final, the final average crowd will approach 23,500.

That is greater than I would have anticipated and it is significantly greater than the figure for the last World Cup, which was held in England in 2022.

But now our thoughts turn to Brisbane and to whether the Kiwis can win the World Cup for the second time, after their triumph in 2008.

After their victory over Tonga on Saturday I would have made them favourites.

But after this game it’s too close to call and I sense that the Aussies are peaking at the right time, as they inevitably do.