Do you believe that a Peacock whose footwork had gone, off-load game had gone and generally looks like he's having to make a massive effort to drag his body around the field would have been selected for international representation?

Re the Kirke/Singleton debate: if this is one of the worst decisions McD makes during his tenure he'll have done pretty well.

McDermott's worst decision (so far) was allowing Danny Buderus to leave whilst still under contract without securing an adequate replacement and then compounding that mistake by not securing the Shaun Lunt gift-horse after it fell right into his lap.

Allowing the undisciplined Bailey straight back into the side after Singleton had played a blinder in Leeds' best showing for months the game before was a minor aberration by comparison.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your point, but as a point of detail didn't Bailey's return come at the expense of Alex Foster?

Agree re Bailey but I'd need to know what role GH played in the Lunt/Buderus decisions before criticising McDermott for them. In any case, Lunt was under contract to Hudds. Brown might have been willing to release him but I doubt Anderson would have, given that he's picked him week in, week out since his return. Perhaps it was simply bad luck: Leeds may have thought there was ample time to sort out a deal before being wrong-footed by Brown's unexpectedly-premature departure and replacement by a coach who clearly rates Lunt more highly.

Singleton is a very different type of player to Kirke. It isnt necessarily simply a decision over who you think is the better player, but who you think can do the job you need them to do.

Yep! He has talent and the abilities to be a RL forward

Stop it Smokey. Rational debate which doesn't slaughter the coach is not really approved of here.

Kirke was very good in the last 6 weeks of last year. He deserved his place. His qualities complement players like JP and our game plan. Solid, reliable, few missed tackles ( although he had a patch mid year where he seemingly forgot how to defend), few mistakes. When it comes to making metres I'd rather see JP or Delaney carrying the ball but I thought Kirke ran stronger with broken ribs than at any point previously! Perhaps the pain killers warped his brain as well!

I do struggle to see that Singleton is the finished article and answer to all our forward ills.

He's well on his way, and brings us great energy. But he is still young (props often mature a little slower than other players after all) and remains a little bit error prone in defence and attack.

I think people are seeing what they want to see some of the time. The lad's on the right track and getting better all the time. He still has developing to do though.

I don't think people are getting too carried away with the lad, it's just that many see the fact of when JP does retire we are going to be left with a gaping hole in our front row and go forward, and Singleton has the potential to fill some of that void so the more exposure he gets to the first team the better.Plus, he does seem to be improving all the time.

You only have to watch Saints at the moment to see an example of a player that has grown immeasurably since being cast aside by our club and who im sure would have been a cornerstone of our pack for the next decade if we had stuck with him.

Amor is 26, i dont think he will play another 10 years.

I agree with most of paragraph 1, but he doesn't need to play 60 minutes every week to get enough exposure to the first team. The JP-shaped hole is unfillable, but accepting that it will take 2 men to fill it, Singleton may well be one of them. He has nearly 2 years to grow into that role.

Maybe Amor needed to go somewhere else, there's never a guarantee that a player would develop the same staying in one place. But it may well be that letting him go won't prove a great decision. The proof of that pudding will be in the eating.

I rmeember times when casting Dowes and Carvell aside didn't seem to have been a great idea, but over their careers we won a big shiny bucketload of silverware, so the sum of our suqad building efforts was right, even if not all the details were. Time will tell if that will be the same now. Amor is all of 3 games into his Saints career, and they have flown out of the traps. Long way to go.

Best part of then

if things had been done as they should have been he would have already had a good season under his belt with us too.