It was something special for a young Kevin Walters, being woken up in the small hours to crowd around the family television set to watch Australia’s rugby league team battling away on some far-flung field in England.<\/p>\n
That lad from the Queensland town of Ipswich, stirred from sleep, learned of the rivalry first-hand, witnessing the rich colour of the green and gold shirts on the screen as they ran, passed, tackled and kicked against the ferocious ‘Poms’.<\/p>\n
Walters, along with brothers Kerrod and Steve, would go on to live out those childhood dreams and become one of those heroes, as a Kangaroos tourist in the ‘Old Dart’ as a player.<\/p>\n
Now, he gets the chance to lead Australia out as head coach, having replaced former Test team-mate Mal Meninga. He always coveted this job.<\/p>\n
And, not only that, in an Ashes series too. Perfection for a rugby league nut. <\/p>\n
“It is a world game and we are taking the Kangaroos to England for an Ashes battle, which hasn’t happened for a long time,” Walters told BBC Sport.<\/p>\n
“So that part of it excites me as well, where we take on the English on foreign soil. It’s a big challenge for us, but one that, you know, I and the rest of the staff and all the players that I’ve spoken to so far are very much something forward to.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was something special for a young Kevin Walters, being woken up in the small hours to crowd…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":98222,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-98221","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rugby","8":"tag-rugby","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}