Gareth Ellis is that rare beast, a Pom in the NRL. “I can tell you,” Ellis said, “they don’t reckon too much to Super League down there.”

Domestic rugby league will gets its annual health check on Saturday from Australia, whose 52-4 hammering of England in the pool stages of the 2008 World Cup simply hardened attitudes Down Under after another merciless exposure of the British game’s soft underbelly.

Ellis, like Adrian Morley, his fellow England forward, before him, has done his bit during his first season at Wests Tigers to convince sceptics that the Super League can still produce home-grown talent capable of thriving in the sport’s most ferociously competitive environment.

Indeed, Ellis was the Sydney club’s player of the year. Not that you will catch anyone in Australia, despite raised eyebrows there at a 20-20 draw with New Zealand at the weekend, expecting anything other than a walloping in Wigan for England on Saturday — a match the Kangaroos must win to stay on course for the Gillette Four Nations final at Elland Road on November 14.

Ellis, 28, will be joined in the NRL next year by another rugged England forward, Sam Burgess, who has signed for South Sydney Rabbitohs. As happened with the powerful New Zealand team, who are no longer drawn from their domestic competition but are all steeled in the Australian league furnace, the suspicion is that it may take a mass migration of leading English players to the hotspots of Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne to create a national team capable of competing against the two southern hemisphere superpowers.

Morley mostly ploughed a lone furrow while at Sydney Roosters, his pleas to Great Britain team-mates to follow him ignored, until Brian Carney had a successful spell at Newcastle Knights in 2006. Ellis left after winning a second Super League title with Leeds Rhinos for the NRL hothouse. “It was something I wished to do and it’s worked out better than I could have hoped for,” he said. “I’d urge others to try but only, if like Sam, they really want to.”

Tim Sheens, the Australia coach, who is also Ellis’s club coach at Wests, said: “I thought he’d take time to settle, but he didn’t. He hit the ground running. From game one, he was strong, he hit hard and stayed out there for 80 minutes. He looked like an Aussie playing an Aussie game, he knuckled in and worked hard. We had a good season and he was outstanding.

“Last year in the World Cup he was replaced regularly during the games, but there was only once in our season when he didn’t finish. Under our conditions, the hardness of the ground means the game can be physical, but he handled it pretty well. You only have to listen to opposition players who said, ‘how hard is that Pom kid?’ ”

Ellis appreciates from the hiding in Melbourne 12 months ago how Australia can overwhelm opponents. “They could probably field two or three teams,” he said. “Every club has two or three superstars in their team and then there’s those just underneath who are really good players as well. They seem to have a production line, but I think England will eventually follow suit.

“It’s starting to happen. It’s a young squad this time around and some of them only made an impression in Super League the last 12 months. We all know what we’re up against and we need to make sure we’re ready for them.”

Export analysis

Gareth Widdop
From Halifax, scored two tries in Melbourne Storm Under-20s Grand Final defeat of Wests Tigers.

Mark Flanagan
The Wigan Warriors loose forward will join Ellis at Wests in 2010.

Sam Burgess
Has captured the public’s imagination since signing for South Sydney Rabbitohs. Was pursued by Russell Crowe, the club’s co-owner, who charmed Burgess’s mother when they met on the set of his film Robin Hood.