The Rugby League World Cup 2013
The tournament is upon us and the first salvos have been fired. It’s great that the BBC has the broadcast rights as it means that a wider audience has access to this great game. I have always admired the courage of these players who face each other and collide with tremendous impacts time after time whilst controlling and creating exciting moves with the ball. They are immensely brave and immensely talented. So what do we make of this “World challenge”.
Its simple really. Australia win it. 2008 wont happen again. Not because they are that much better than England or 
New Zealand, they just think they are and sometimes that’s enough. England can compete and quite often do for long periods of the game but they just make too many mistakes. Similarly New Zealand who have exciting play makers, who are used to NRL pressure week in week out will compete but they don’t have the depth across the pitch and it takes a career best for them to record a win against Australia, which is what they did in 2008.
As a betting medium this is a tough one. We have already seen with Italy vs Wales, or should I say Australia C versus Wales, that you simply cant get a handle on these teams until you know who is playing and finding out squads and players names is difficult. The RLWC official site is to intent on selling tickets and provides almost no useful information save the actual squads. Such is the dearth of opinion about this World Cup that even journalists have no idea what to write and google is bereft of quality information for the punter.
However that doesn’t mean we cant make some money. If we work hard and prepare for each match we should be able to eek out some cash in these minor games before we get to the finals. We struck in the first game taking England plus 14 and its bets like this that we will be concentrating on.
I would really like England to win this and I will be cheering them on. The problem in my book is that Steve McNamara
simply isn’t our best coach and whilst he is there I don’t think we can play to our full potential. If we did, we can run the big guns close. We need a plan to win and I didn’t see it in our opening game and I don’t see how we can bring one together now. Australia’s first game was always the place to beat them and for the first half while they found their feet we had them rocking. Problem is they will get better and better now. That was our chance to top the group and get the easy beat semi final and we missed it.
What do I expect to happen? Group A, Australia, RU- England 3rd Place Fiji, Group B New Zealand RU Samoa 3rd place France. Group C Italy, Group D Wales.
Semi Finals : Australia vs Samoa, New Zealand vs England
Final : England vs Australia
Winner : England (just joking) – Australia.
