Fierce foes to let their actions speak loudest
Samoa and Tonga are keeping very quiet in the lead-up to Friday night's World Cup match at Penrith, writes Greg Prichard.
They were only too ready to take potshots at each other last week, but now that they are just a couple of days away from meeting in a key World Cup match, Samoa and Tonga have lost interest in sticking it to each other verbally.
Neither team wants to make the mistake of saying something out of turn that provides the other with extra motivation. So as Tongan coach Jim Dymock said Samoa would "touch us up" after his team's narrow win over Ireland on Monday night if Tonga played like that again, Samoan captain Nigel Vagana wanted nothing of it yesterday.
Vagana declared the real Tonga would turn up for Friday night's Pool 3 game at CUA Stadium. "I don't take any heart from last night's game," he said of Tonga's 22-20 win against the Irish at Parramatta Stadium.
"They will improve massively for the game against us. Playing in a game you're expected to win comfortably, sometimes it's hard to get up for it, as a player and a team, but on Friday they'll have steam coming out of their ears. Tonga are always going to be ready to play us."
Vagana said he didn't believe any of the Samoans would be lulled into a false sense of security. "There is no sense of security in rugby league," he said.
Samoan coach John Ackland said his team would be asking for trouble if they thought they had Tonga covered. "I don't think that result will mean anything at all on Friday night," Ackland said. "You've got to give the Irish a bit of credit, anyway. They played well. It's a World Cup, a Test match - you can't rely on your opposition playing poorly. Tonga ran hard and tackled hard against Ireland, and they'll come out fired up against us."
Last week, when Tonga went to the NSW Supreme Court to try to get Fuifui Moimoi and Taniela Tuiaki cleared to play for them after the pair had previously linked with New Zealand, it emerged that Vagana had written an email that formed part of the Rugby League International Federation's case. In it, he said that if the pair were cleared Samoa would "kick up a stink … a big one".
Tongan director William Edwards shot back at Vagana, saying his actions were "pretty horrible" and that the RLIF was "just using him as a patsy".
Moimoi and Tuiaki have since been cleared to play from the semi-final stage, if Tonga make it that far, but Vagana said he didn't care about the name-calling. "I've been around for too long to worry about that," he said.
Vagana and Ackland identified five-eighth Feleti Mateo and centre Michael Jennings as the Tongan pair that would provide most danger for Samoa. There were examples of brilliance from both players against Ireland.
"Mateo is a player who is stamping his mark on the NRL," Vagana said. "It would be nice if Jennings didn't touch the ball against us, but that's not going to happen. These sort of players have got the ability to make something out of nothing, and Tonga have got a big, strong pack of forwards who can break tackles quite easily as well."
Asked how the Samoans proposed to limit Mateo from imposing his playmaking skills on the game and making it easier for the men outside him, like Jennings, to get into space, Ackland said: "We can't change the fact Mateo is a good player, but we can try to give him as little time as possible to do what he does well. But, more than anything, we've got to hold the ball well. If we do that, we'll be giving ourselves a good chance to win."
Source:
http://www.leaguehq.com.au
World Cup: Tonga vs Samoa
. Its going to be a cracker.
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