I'm praying we play the one hooker system.

me too. burrow and sinfield can spell buderus there.
we even played one game, wigan?, with no hooker and played really well

How did the Quins play under mac? 1 or 2 hookers? I seem to remember randel playing 80 mins

i think he was spelled but played most of the game

Agree ref Burrow and Sinfield. I hope you're right
.

BM's also highlighted discipline as an area to improve.
I think Quins had a good disciplinary record last year.

Quins have won the Fairplay Index while McD was in charge. Maybe even twice IIRC??

I'm also praying we play with one hooker. Judging by McShane's squad number we will be, also Chad Randell did most of it at Quins so hopefully Buderus will be an 80 minute man. It's not like our lads are shy at jumping in at Dummy Half if he's feeling the pace a little bit. Also, McD's fitness regime is supposed to be amazing so Bedsy may well benefit from that.

Got to hope so, though I'd have preferred DMcG & Peacock to have gone than for them to be recovering from injuries of such severity.

they certainly won it at least once, i was 'lucky' enough to see Henry Paul's very drunken acceptance speech on behalf of the club

Or Webb and Smith depending which of (if either) is at full-back.



13th March 2009, with Jones-Buchanan named as the starting hooker and a bench of Webb, Lauitiiti, Burgess and Peacock. Leeds won 34 - 10 with Burrow, Smith and Webb sharing the dummy half duties.

Leeds also played Jordan Tansey in the starting role twice in 2008.

Didn't we also play Bradford in one of the Magic games with Ian Kirke named as hooker?

I can't remember whether it was the hilarious one or merely the one where we beat them.

Lee Smith effectively played attacking hooker in that game, iirc, though I can't remember if he packed down there. It was an experiment that seemed to work, but was never repeated.

The, er, chunkier version of Smith we have at the moment still has the skills to cause damage from dummy-half, if we want to play Watkins or BJB on the wing. One of the odder things McDermott did at Harlequins was play Danny Orr at hooker a lot of the time.

What was odd about it?

Danny was a half back, which generally are capable of playing hooker. But to add to it, Danny actually was an hooker throughout all of his junior rugby, playing an open age game at 14 years old in that position once.

Fair enough. Except he'd also play the club's best hooker (Randall) at half-back. Not saying Orr was incapable in the role, and didn't know his junior background. I was just using it as evidence that McDermott will possibly play those not known as hookers (Smith, Burrow) at spell hooker/dummy-half.

Where a player is named on the team-sheet can bear little or no resemblance to the role he's actually asked to play in the game.

I suspect in those games where Orr was named at 9 and Randall at 7 they will have both spent time in the dummy half role, while Randall will have defended in the more central role usually occupied by the hooker.