Top class RU backs have the potential to switch to League and be very good, (I agree O'Driscoll would've been a great League player) but it doesn't often happen the other way round - wingers excepted.

Trying to shoe horn a League prop into the centre position in RU is likely to fail miserably, even if the player is world class.

S Burgess is one of those rugby players whose skills aren't specific enough for RU - if he'd started out playing RU he'd probably have been a blind side flanker or no.8, but if you were to put him into either of those positions now he'd loose most of his dynamism and impact on the field.

It just seems like blinkered opportunism from the RFU, but then they are not renowned for sensible forward thinking, they haven't had a genuine success since Robinson.

Why they would look back at Vainikolo, Farrel, Ashton, Hape, Tompkins and Eastmond and think it was still worth doing is highly questionable; yes they all ended up playing for England, but were they really significantly better than other players around at the time? I would think the jury is still out on all of them.

Bath press is convinced he's already signed up for Bath next year - been running in the local press all last week.

One thought is that it's just a way of squeezing more money out of Souths (the same circus is going on around Cameron Smith's on/off move to Brisbane next season). The other is that it's genuine and he has been approached and tempted with the idea of being fast tracked into the England WC squad (and a $h!tload of money as well).

A lot of talk about him playing centre - I think this would be catastrophic if it comes to pass. England lack a cutting edge in the centres, they lack real pace and they lack passing skill. Pace and passing skill are not two things that spring to mind when I think of Sam Burgess. If you want an offloading battering ram in the backs then there are better options already in Union. There are plenty of promising centre prospects that offer what we really lack and the current England management needs to look at in more detail (Burrell being one and Kyle Eastmond the other). Which I am sure they will.
However, I can see Burgess fitting in at 8. All England seem to expect of a no.8 these days is someone to smash the ball over the gain line and offload when possible. Also he could really dish out the tackles. Jerry Collins was a great All Black 6/8 and that's pretty much all he did. Tom Wood and Robshaw do the thinking in the back row and we don't pick a number 8 to win lineout ball, Burgess would fit in very well with those two.

Interesting.

Mega LOLZ.

Re: Burgess at 8.

Would he really offer that much more in the way of getting across the gain line and ability to offload than Billy Vunipola currently offers?

In a word...no.

Some skills transfer between codes better than others. Pace, elusiveness and tackle-busting power are qualities that can happily find a home in either code. Handling skills and impact in the tackle/collision are of increasing importance in RU, and there is still a sense that they lag a bit behind RL there. For the most part though I think it's a depth problem rather than something you need to solve with one marquee player at Test level. On the flip side, the turnover-related skills of a back-row forward in RU, line-out jumping, scrummaging are all very RU specific. They are the obstacle to forwards going either way between codes: RL players generally don't have those skills and need to learn them, top RU players have them as a very key part of their value, and thus can generally make more of a career for themselves staying where they are.

John Gallagher

Maybe a little, he is, as we've already noted, a terrific athlete and an uber competitor. He'd do the job very well. I would just question whether he'd really do it enough better that it'd be worth splashing a small fortune on for the RFU when Vunipola and Morgan already compete for that shirt.

Likewise he could do the battering ram centre part. Maybe even better than the likes of Tuilagi and Burrell (maybe not, time would have to tell) but it's unlikely he'd do it so much better that it was really worth the investment. As has been noted above, England RU have a surfeit of battering rams, they have a shortage of scalpels in midfield. Burgess doesn't solve that problem.

I doubt I'd let this put me off if I was Sam Burgess. He'd no doubt relish the challenge of forcing his way into the team.

I do think he's almost the perfectly designed modern-day RL forward, and I don't think he's as well designed for RU.

Jonathan Davies.

Better running angles for a start, quicker off the mark, smarter footballer, better positioning. Add to that his tackling which would be several levels above Vunipola and you have a superior player potentially.
Vunipola's offloading game has been exaggerated, he offloaded out of the tackle once or twice during the Scotland game, most of the time he goes to ground - that's the way he has played most of his few games so far. I actually prefer Ben Morgan, who has better positioning on the field and is a better footballer - he is also a big brute with ball in hand.
Vunipola would be the ideal bench player to bring on and cause havoc last 20 minutes - which is how he was very effectively used on the Argentina tour.

Craig Innes.
Martin Offiah.
Keith Fielding.
David Watkins.