KEY POINTS:
The tag "champion" has always swirled around Ricky Stuart - he was a champion player for the Kangaroos, a champion coach with the Roosters and New South Wales and he's always been one of league's champion dummy-spitters.
They reckon the halfbacks are always the punchy ones and he
proves the adage.
Stuart's moan about the poor opposition Australia had in lead-up to the World Cup final with easy-beats Papua New Guinea then Fiji, about the refereeing during the game and about the video review that gave tries to New Zealand should be roundly ignored on this side of the Tasman.
The facts are these: Stuart claimed there was no strip on Benji Marshall in the lead-up to Jeremy Smith's try in the first half.
But the World Cup referee's boss Mick Stone, an Australian with long experience in the NRL, had this in reply - "Anthony Laffranchi clearly had his hand on the ball and it rotated as it came from Benji Marshall's grip and was therefore a strip," since a second player was around Marshall's legs at the time.
Stuart claimed the penalty try awarded to Lance Hohaia when he was pulled down by Joel Monaghan in the chase for a kick to the Australian in-goal was an injustice. Stone said that video reviewer Steve Ganson had only to be of the opinion that Hohaia would have scored to award the penalty try against Monaghan.
Stuart claimed Kiwis players were in front of the ball when the kick was put through for Adam Blair to score. Stone said the after-match review had shown they were not.
The England Rugby Football League's director of referees, Stuart Cummings, said he was happy with the performance of referee Ashley Klein and Ganson. "I'm very proud of the way Ashley handled himself in the match and the job he did," Cummings told the Australian media.
So Stuart was out-and-out wrong on the Smith and Blair tries.
In the case of the penalty try he may have some argument. For me, it would have been a penalty try if the ball was dead in goal or about to be so and Hohaia was taken down from behind with no one else within cooee. But Kangaroos fullback Billy Slater was close by and the peanut-shaped football tends to do the strangest things at times in eluding players.
It was definitely a penalty. And Monaghan should have been sin-binned for a deliberate professional foul against a player who had the prospect of scoring a try.
Take the four points out for Hohaia's try and award two for a penalty and the Kiwis score drops from 34-20 to 30-20. It's still a decisive victory.
The Kangaroos were in control of the match for just the first 19 minutes and then succumbed to greater pressure and a better execution rate.
They played well, produced some brilliant tries. And were beaten by a better team on the day.
It's a shame Stuart can't accept that and give credit where it's due, in the way the often-beaten Kiwis players and their fans have always respected Australia as the champions to beat.
The Rugby League International Federation may well investigate the verbal altercation Stuart had with Klein and Cummings as they left their Brisbane hotel on the day after the game. But there is no punishment it can impose that will hurt Stuart as much as losing did.
