“And when you’ve been coached for years by [the Brisbane coach] Wayne Bennett, you know how to tackle.”Carroll will, for the first time, be tackling team-mates for club and state when the Kiwis play Australia at Old Trafford tomorrow. It says much about the strength of the Brisbane club that he will be lining up against four of them – Darren Lockyer, Wendell Sailor, Shane Webcke and Gorden Tallis – in the final.”I think I’ll have more trouble with Wendell’s mouth than anything. They’ll be letting me know what they think about me playing for the Kiwis.”Carroll himself has no regrets about his decision, only that Australia had their “wake-up call” against Wales on Sunday. “I went to the game and I’d have preferred they’d won by 70-odd points in a walk-over They had a good, hard hit-out. Even if they hadn’t, though, they would still have been tough at Old Trafford.”Carroll was only a spectator, still unsure about his international future, when Australia put 52 points past New Zealand in the infamous Anzac Day Test earlier this year. “But a lot of circumstances were against us that day, with the Paul brothers [Henry and Robbie] flying out just before the game. This will be different, because it will be a pretty fair contest.

Both teams have shown the form to win it, so it just comes down to the better team on the day.”With his take-no-prisoners style and a jutting chin that makes him look like a long-lost relative of Jimmy Hill, Carroll will be an instantly recognisable figure in Super League next season.Just as with reclaiming his Kiwi heritage, he has no qualms about his decision to move to a third country, unlike his Brisbane team- mate, Kevin Campion, who played for Ireland in the World Cup and is now having second thoughts about joining Warrington because his experience of Britain is that it never stops raining.”I don’t mind the cold and the rain,” says Carroll, who has been to Headingley to meet his future team-mates and has found a house on the outskirts of the city. “I’m going home to get married and I’ll be back for pre-season training.”By then, Carroll could be the insider who helped deprive Australia of the World Cup for the first time since 1972.. Clive Woodward has made five changes to his England side for tomorrow’s Twickenham Test with Argentina, not that anyone took much account of the fact when the red rose manager revealed his hand yesterday. The talk was of an altogether more significant change: an apparent shift in the balance of power between the Rugby Football Union, dusting themselves down after one of the more humiliating pratfalls in their recent history, and the 20-odd members of the international squad, who remained convinced of the justice of their 34-hour strike over pay. Clive Woodward has made five changes to his England side for tomorrow’s Twickenham Test with Argentina, not that anyone took much account of the fact when the red rose manager revealed his hand yesterday. The talk was of an altogether more significant change: an apparent shift in the balance of power between the Rugby Football Union, dusting themselves down after one of the more humiliating pratfalls in their recent history, and the 20-odd members of the international squad, who remained convinced of the justice of their 34-hour strike over pay.
Woodward himself fired a howitzer-sized shot across the RFU bows.

“My position has not altered in so far as I still disagree with the action taken by the players,” he pronounced. “I can’t condone it and I won’t condone it, although in a perverse way it’s worked out quite well in the sense that the deal has been signed and the whole thing is now done and dusted. But I have to say that the union must take a large amount of the responsibility for what happened. It is unacceptable that things should have been allowed to get as far as they did.”The manager named no names, but the ears of Francis Baron, the RFU chief executive, will have been warmer than most. It emerged yesterday that the senior players who negotiated with Baron during the late-night meltdown meeting on Monday – Martin Johnson, Lawrence Dallaglio and Matthew Dawson – objected to what they considered his patronising and confrontational approach.