It has been more than two decades since the last Ashes series, but Garry Schofield has not been waiting quietly. The most-capped Great Britain back in history, with 46 Tests for the Lions plus three for England, sat down on Fox League this week with Benny Elias and Matty Johns expecting to talk about the Kangaroos rolling England again. He left less convinced of the result than the script demanded.
"The British public, we can't wait for the Kangaroos to come over," Schofield said. "Are we going to win the Ashes? Time will tell. A little bit surprised this week. You know, Freddy Fittler was offered the job but he's turned it down. But also, a little bit surprised by Freddy's comments saying, you know, the preparation, they don't seem to be taking it serious enough about the training grounds, about the hotels."
Fittler's withdrawal from coaching consideration — and his pointed remarks about the way the tour was being assembled — landed badly with Schofield, who has spent years admiring the way Australian rugby league teams plan around international windows.
"Which I find a little bit strange," he said. "Because as far as I know, the Australians have always been very professional, very meticulous in their planning."
Whether or not Australia eventually patch things together at training-camp level, Schofield believes that an under-prepared Kangaroos side meets an England team with a real shot at the kind of pack-driven win the British game is built around.
"I can reassure you, if they don't plan right, we've got a pack of forwards who will compete with you," he said. "But again, it's just that backline of ours and the halfbacks, the creativity, that may be just a little bit lacking. But if the Aussies don't prepare properly, who knows what's going to happen."
The acknowledgement of England's halves is honest. Fitting Harry Smith into the same conversation as a Daly Cherry-Evans or a Nathan Cleary takes a leap that most pundits north of the equator have not been willing to make. But the forward platform is genuinely there, and the prospect of three Tests at packed crowds — Wembley, Everton Stadium in Liverpool and Headingley — is the most charged Ashes setup in a generation.
"It's been 22, 23 years since the Ashes have been on," Schofield said. "Two generations of missed Kangaroo tours and Great Britain tours coming out here as British Lions."
Schofield is uniquely placed to bridge those generations. After 19 years old he was named to the Balmain Tigers in the late 1980s under coach Frank Stanton, who handed him the kind of brief any teenage half-back dreams of.
"My father said to me when I started out as a nine-year-old, if the ball's not coming to you, you go looking for it," Schofield said. "And when I met Frank, his first words to me were, 'Listen, lad, you're here to score tries. You've got free roll.' That was music to my ears."
He finished top try-scorer at Balmain in his first season and joint-top in 1986 with Phil Blake. The respect, he said, ran two ways — and had to be earned by adapting to the way Australian players trained.
"You had to switch on straight away," he said. "It wasn't a matter of, 'Well, we don't do this in England, we don't do that in England.' You had to get training into it."
The verdict on the Ashes itself stayed cautiously open. Asked, with mock cheer, if England could win it for the first time since 1970, Schofield smiled.
"Oh, you got as much chance as Queensland," Matty Johns shot back, dropping a State of Origin reference for safe measure.
Schofield did not concede the point. If Fittler was telling the truth about the way the tour is being run, he suggested, the Kangaroos may have given the British public more hope than they have managed in two decades.
