SHAUN WANE must be feeling good about himself this week.
And he has every right to feel that way.
The combative England coach, who wears his heart on his sleeve, has been fully vindicated during this Test series against opponents who were tipped as potentially a banana skin for England before the first Test at St Helens just over two weeks ago.
Shaun was bitterly disappointed, as was I, by England’s semi-final defeat to Samoa in last year’s World Cup.
That was a shattering result that seemed to have the same effect as England’s semi-final defeat to New Zealand at Wembley nine years earlier – a late strike by the opposition that reversed the script of England winning a World Cup in this country.
Both those scores were very tight ones, with England on the wrong side of them, and I’m never sure whether it’s better to lose a very tight match in the last minute, or to get hammered, in the way that England were beaten 49-6 in the 2000 World Cup semi-final by New Zealand at Bolton in 2000. At least in that game, when England were coached by John Kear, we knew our fate long before the final whistle. Our disappointment was mitigated by the knowledge that we clearly didn’t deserve to reach the World Cup Final.
The Tongans very nearly defeated us in the semi-final of the 2017 tournament. In fact they were unlucky not to do so when they went down 20-18 in Auckland.
So it was fair to assume that six years later they would be even more of a threat, especially as they were coming to England with a squad that was selected exclusively from the ranks of the NRL, while their coach Kristian Woolf, who had enjoyed so much success with St Helens, was in his tenth year of coaching the Tongans.
But as it turned out, there was no need for any English fans to have any sense of trepidation about what would unfold.
The Tongans took us close at St Helens, losing by only four points, while the margin was extended to ten points at Huddersfield in a game that had few highlights, before England really cut loose on Saturday at Headingley, scoring four wonderful tries, any one of which was a potential try of the week.
I had thought that the Tongans might come out for this clash determined to win at least one game in the series, but if they did, they were no match for England. The gap between the two sides had grown during the series until the English proved themselves to be much the superior team.
I was delighted to see Harry Smith win the Nan Halafihi Medal as the best player in the tournament, which was much deserved. His kick across the field for England’s fourth try, scored by Harry Newman, was possibly the highlight of the whole tournament. After the game, Wane was generous enough to give the coaching credit for that try to his assistant Lee Briers, who has done so many great things at Brisbane Broncos in 2023.
The result of that will certainly be a massive increase in interest in Smith from NRL clubs seeking a player who can control the game on the field and I would guess, perhaps conservatively, that Smith’s value on the market must have doubled as a result of this Test series, and deservedly so.
But he wasn’t the only reason for England’s success.
Shaun had to make a big call on Saturday in dropping Mikey Lewis, who had played so well in the first two Test matches, and whose emotional interview after the game at St Helens will live long in the memory.
In a sense the coach and his captain George Williams could have been on a hiding to nothing if England had performed badly after making that change.
But we needn’t have worried. England gave one of their best performances for many years. If they had played like that against Samoa in last year’s semi-final, they would surely have won that game.
It was great to see a back line selected purely from Super League doing so well against their NRL rivals, with England’s spine players of Jack Welsby, Williams, Smith and Daryl Clark clearly coming out on top against their rivals, which no doubt will give the Tongan coach plenty to ponder on the flight back to Australia.
Harry Newman will also field plenty of interest from Australia, while Wests Tigers coach Benji Marshall will have been an interested bystander as John Bateman against demonstrated that he is perhaps the best offloader of a ball out of the tackle anywhere in the world.
On a day when New Zealand defeated Australia by a record score, it made me regret that we won’t be playing the Kangaroos until 2025.
And I would be surprised if Shaun Wane didn’t feel the same way.
