Anyone can drink beer, there is no skill or achievement needed. Hardly anyone gets the chance to play at the highest level of their chosen sport in it's biggest competition. I would have binned the lot of them and replaced them with guys who understand this.

They should have been all flogged to death in training for losing to Italy anyway, not allowed a night out and a f****g lie in.

Of course you need to differentiate the player from the offence. You can not have a team sport where one player is handled differently to another for an offence.



The issue here though is that Hock is incorrect to believe that the drinking and the sleeping in are seperate. The sleeping in will have being deemed by the managment, and quite rightly, as a consequence of drinking.



As long as the management would have dealt the same way with any other player who did that same thing (drinking and then slept in and avoiding training), then it has being handled correctly.

Well said.

It really is quite sad....the quite surprising regular BBC build up to the competition did actually spark some semblance of interest in our family ....then came this, after the earlier Italy embarrassment. At least the match did give a degree more credibility to the concept of a "world" game, but conversely diminishes England's pretence at being a true potential winner.



If England collapse against Oz it will set the game back in this country even further than it already is ; this after the BBC is finally apparently marketing the competition and game far more than it has ever done previously.



Well done all.

On the other hand, maybe part of the reason Tomkins is one of the best in the world is that for all his silly antics on the field, he turns up sober for training and puts the work in. Maybe.

Why cant you have a team sport were one player is handled differently to another? Isnt this what happens when a player comes before a disciplinary after an offence on the field of play? You have to take previous misdemeanours into account when handing out punishment hence the EGP that Briers used before their semi final game. Same thing happened at Saints a few years back with the Long/Gleeson betting scandal, same offence but different punishments. That's life and Hock should have been aware that no matter what the other sheep did he should definitely have stayed at the shepherd's side as his previous was always going to be brought up.

Has his previous been brought into this by the management though? He is the only one who missed training & a medical. No-one, apart from in the media, has mentioned it.

Maybe Hock was worried what the medical may show up?

That his skull is, infact, completely empty?

How seriously are some of the players [ireally[/i taking this when they go out for drinks after an embarassing loss just a week before the tournament kicks off for real, when the coaching staff have put a drinking ban until after the aussie game?

Fair question.



I'd go with DHM's suggestion of binning the lot of them and bringing in people who are at least committed to the cause and have some sense of what it should mean to represent your country in a World Cup.