League: Sheens wants Aussies to harden up

Kiwi's Simon Mannering. Photo / Richard Robinson

Kangaroos coach Tim Sheens likes to draw on his inner Chopper Read when preparing his side for tests against the Kiwis.

One of Australia's most colourful violent criminals, Read was the subject of a 2000 movie that became a cult classic. More recently, comedian Heath Franklin adopted the Choppa persona, with his stand-up character of the same name coining the catchphrase: "Harden the f*** up, Australia."

He might not express it in such blunt terms, but that's pretty much the message Sheens has been imparting to his troops since taking the Kangaroos coaching reins from Ricky Stuart in 2009.

Forged from his playing days as a prop with the Panthers in the wild and lawless days of the 1970s - an era when blatant headbutts often drew no more than a stern warning from the referee - Sheens is no stranger to knock 'em down and drag 'em out footy. The same can't be said of many of his players, who for the most part earn their pay in the sanitised world of the NRL.

"As I explained to my guys, this is not NRL," Sheens said.

"The NRL is so clean that anything that comes anywhere near a chin is put on report. Test matches are different, State of Origin is different, grand finals are different."

Tests against the Kiwis are particularly different.

"In '09 when we were playing the Kiwis when we got hammered and ended up fluking a draw, at halftime I said [to the players], 'Look, you are in a test match,"' Sheens recalled. "It is a different standard of game. The Kiwis were giving it to us and our blokes just went 'whoa, what's going on here, that should be a penalty'. [Steve] Ganson, the English referee, just went 'play on'. We've soon learned that you have got to change your mentality.

"If you are going to hit a bloke high, sometimes that is not even a penalty."

It's more of an observation than a complaint from Sheens. His counterpart Stephen Kearney - who in 47 test matches as a player was involved in a good few forearm-to-chin collisions - denied he has picked a team with a mind to softening up the Kangaroos ahead of the Four Nations. The presence of hard nuts Jared Waerea Hargreaves and Sika Manu on the bench, however, does little to dispel that impression.

"Those sort of players have that [tough] mentality and we've picked a pretty tough side ourselves for the same reason," Sheens said. "You just understand that it is a different standard set."

That the standard setting will be done once again by an English referee, Phil Bentham, also points to a rugged encounter. Sheens is still smarting from the performance of English whistler Richard Silverwood in May's Anzac test, which was won by Australia 20-10.

"We did not receive one penalty from the English referee, not one," Sheens said. "I have never played or coached a game and not received at least one penalty."

Silverwood awarded just two penalties in that match, one for a tackle while a player was in the air and the other for a high tackle, prompting commenter Phil Gould to ask, "Why have we flown this guy out here if he's not going to blow his whistle?"

While he didn't want to see the match descend into a "mudfight", Sheens was happy enough that the players would probably be left to sort most things out for themselves.

For Kearney, the nature of the contest is simple: "They are our toughest and most formidable foe."