BY JOHN DAVIDSON
Brian McDermott has described England’s long-odds mission against Papua New Guinea to stay alive in the 2026 World Cup as “remarkable”.
England needs to not only defeat Papua New Guinea in Wollongong on Friday night, but also overturn a 68-point differential. They also must rely on Tonga beating Samoa at CommBank on Sunday night, otherwise they are eliminated regardless.
McDermott, who has worked as a player and coach in the professional game for more than 30 years, says he has never been in this kind of scenario before.
“Never, yeah, never. It’s quite remarkable,” he said.
“In England, you can play when you’re playing the Challenge Cup, you sometimes draw a Championship team. They’re from the divisions below and you’re expected to win, and ordinarily, ordinarily, the Super League team always struggles because the expectation gets too much.
“And, yeah, they quite often win, but it’s a scrappy win, and everybody, the Championship team, valiantly loses. So, that’s not us, that’s not us, with PNG, and PNG are a bloody good team as well, by the way.
“I don’t know if we’re expected to win or not, by other people’s standards. But we gotta win big, and that’s unique. That is unique, so… It’s something we’re not shying away from.
“Look, they’re the conversations we’re having. But you try and balance those conversations and then be respectful of PNG at the same time. And know full well that if we don’t get it right, there’ll be more than a handful of it.”
Asked what the approach will be to the Kumuls game, McDermott said: “There’s a couple of, like, usuals, when you want to win a game, you’re saying certain things.
“If you’re trying to win any game, just keep hold of the ball, dominate field possession. Be disciplined where you defend and, in today’s world, you’ve got to turn them away from your try-line defensively a couple of times to give yourself a hope of getting in the contest.
“But then we’ve got this added, well, this unique situation, we don’t just need to win, we need to win big. As soon as you start talking about that, it sounds really disrespectful to the opposition, you know?
“Against France, they came off a big loss, and I knew a couple of coaches they’ve got there in Trent and Laurent, who are smart guys, so we knew they would be up for it.
“So it was a real challenge to say, ‘Look, let’s get ready for a real big battle’. But be conscious that we need to score points, but then at the same time, though, it would be disrespectful to expect to score those points.
“… so we find ourselves pretty much in a very similar situation against a bit of a dangerous team [in PNG].”
After Friday night, England will have almost two days to wait until Tonga vs Samoa on Sunday evening, to find out their World Cup fate.
McDermott says his team will not have time off and will continue to prepare in that period as though they are headed to the semi-finals.
“We’ll come together and we’ll recover on Saturday, and we’ve got a process to go through on Saturday and if we do progress through, we need to be in good shape for that,” he said.
“So we’re going to watch the game, and, yeah a unique situation there where we’re either getting excited at the end of the game, or we’re saying our goodbyes to each other.
“And, again, whether we’re doing either one of those, there’s a really good way for us to behave and conduct ourselves.
“And however we finish this tournament, we’ll bleed into the next tournament, or it’ll bleed into next week. We’ve just to make sure that it’s a good version.”
