The players who took part in our other matches were there in support, whether it was him or Ricky Stuart at half-back, but at Wembley they weren’t'Although Fulton is giving away little yet about possible team changes, the forwards in tomorrow night’s match against Sheffield Eagles have a splendid opportunity to show that they can do better.Although old habits sometimes die hard, Fulton has laboured manfully to eliminate tediously routine criticism of referees from his repertoire.However, some of his players felt that Great Britain had been allowed to encroach offside in wide positions, and he has not been in a rush to dissociate himself from that view.There is a superb irony at work here. They do their training, they play golf, they write postcards home.’Maybe so, but Fulton was sacrificing his own daily trip to the golf course yesterday, and the messages back to Australia would have to wait as well.Instead, a long session in a darkened room beckoned. ‘We’ve got to fix a couple of things,’ he said, his initial audit already showing more handling mistakes than the official statistics. The other thing which is already blindingly clear is the uncharacteristic lack of support for the half-break which sabotaged his side’s efforts.’When Alfie (Allan Langer) takes the ball to the line, he’s got to have support inside and outside Put it this way. ‘They are used to treating one defeat as the first part of a series They get on with doing what they do. A matter of tour policy?
Another strand of Fulton’s famed psychology? ‘Not really.

It’s just that they would have to buy them themselves.’If that is the case, the Kangaroos will also have avoided much of the analysis of Saturday’s upset There is certainly no sign of trauma ‘They are professionals,’ Fulton said. Some suspects have already been eliminated from inquiries, however, including one of the superficially more obvious ones ‘There was no complacency,’ he said. ‘The way that we started both halves showed that there was no complacency.’

Nor was there any question of his players believing their press cuttings; the ones in this paper and others which concluded, on the overwhelming evidence of their first matches here, that they had arrived from a different planet ‘They don’t read the papers,’ Fulton said. Bob Fulton, the Australian rugby league coach, sat down with a video machine yesterday and tried to work out what went wrong at Wembley. In these circumstances, Rowell should respect the players’ wishes.But what if the club decide the player should play? That is quite different.I wonder whether Rowell himself, when he was the Bath coach, stood his England players down on the Saturday before an international I do not know the answer to this I merely ask..

This demonstrates that club selfishness is not confined to Bath.Rowell is now, I see, trying to play down that no England player should turn out for his club on the Saturday immediately before an international Some players, however, prefer to do so. One of them is Dean Richards, who will, I predict, be back, together with Nigel Redman, before the season is out. But Dallaglio, probably the fastest forward in English rugby, plays No 6 for his club, in spite of requests from England to play him at No 7. Instead, Rowell has persisted with Victor Ubogu at tight head.