Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
TON OF WOE Lions made to pay for errors
I WAS so happy to make my Great Britain debut, but it’s hard to stay happy when you lose and I’m a pretty sore loser.
But I hope this sends out a message to all those people who make stupid comments about me not being committed.
Yes, I was born in Australia but I qualify and it p*sses me off when people say I shouldn’t have been picked.
It was the proudest moment of my career when I got presented with my jersey and cap the night before the game.
I had a few tears because my nan would have been so proud, if she was still with us, that I am representing the country she was born in.
Jamie Peacock gave a speech about what it means to wear the jersey and Wayne Bennett (above) shook my hand and said I deserved it.
To hear those words from both of them meant a lot to me and I got pretty emotional because I am fulfilling a lifelong dream to play representative football.
If it wasn’t for England I would not be anything. Moving to England has changed the way I have looked at rugby league and life in general.
I do not really care about what anyone says – I know how proud I am and what it means to me. I train my butt off every day and I tried to prove tonight what it means to me.
If anyone doubts where my heart is, or that I know about the history of the Lions, then they can come and question me.
I want to play well for the rest of this tour and hopefully in the future I can be part of another Great Britain team if it happens again as well as part of the England set-up.
The only thing I’m disappointed in is the way we lost.
We knew Tonga’s strengths, both offensively and defensively, and they competed really hard.
We committed some uncharacteristic errors and turned over the ball cheaply and you cannot afford to do that against players like those.
It was a hard night for us but it’s a pretty simple fix for us and we will get back on the horse against New Zealand next Saturday.
Both their tries were a bit unlucky but when you play like they were you get the bounce of the ball.
But you cannot take anything away from them, they were too good for us and we missed a lot of opportunities.
Personally I was happy with a few things considering I only learned the plays on Monday, but I will try and get my hands on the ball a bit more next week.