England RU in Dramatic Sam Burgess Coup?

Quote: Clubber_Lang "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.'"

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.