I hope Walsh stays at Saints for a number of years. He's great to watch and can teach all young superleague halves a thing or two about how to control a game. He looks the difference to me between Saints being a top 4 side challenging for trophies or falling in to that 5-8th place bracket of team that will struggle to win the major honours. He's the best NRL halfback I've seen come to superleague since Trent Barrett.

There lies the problem though I suppose. It seems strange in times like these to see a player of that class and age come over and that probably means you'll always have NRL teams sniffing about.

Brett Seymour as a replacement possibly?

No thanks

Haha, I know it's a mad suggestion, but if we wrap him in cotton wool...and his car, we might get a bit of quality out of him.

I could name 5 better replacements for 2016, or 3 (rumours) for 2015! I sincerely hope not!

Me too, but I was thinking for this season in case we need an immediate replacement.

From what I've read, there is no way it will be an immediate replacement. Worst case scenario is he will see out the year.

Even if we were desperate for an immediate replacement I'd rather we went for Ryan Millard (and we'd almost definitely end up with gob)

Let's hear the 3 rumours

It'll be Burns, O'Brien and Williams.

Can we stop all this talking in code and just post the rumours? What on earth does that mean?

Well they are 3 rumours, but I wasn't thinking about the rumours to saints, just rumours floating about about Aussie halfbacks.

Gareth O'Brien!

That's a very disappointing name.

Saints need a pair of half backs.
I thought Walsh would be here for two years with Wheeler definitely going
and Hohaia possibly going at the end of 2014.


Burns would be good as a wise 6 with a young buck at 7
Millard would be ok at 6 to complete a pair.
Williams looks interesting again as a junior partner in a pair of HBs.
Sneyd would be class.
Brierley would be very good.

O'Brien just smacks of average.

Sneyd and Smith

We are potentially in the rather strange position of having to replace our entire halfback section of the team (that said - there is still nothing to say Walsh won't at least see out his initial contract)

O'Brien is a good 2nd scrum half, who has the potential to develop into a solid, if unspectacular super league half back ala Matty Smith.

In an ideal world, Walsh and Williams backed up by O'Brien and Charnock would be our halfback options going into 2015 - with Walsh leaving and going for Sneyd in 2016 (though I'd prefer Walsh to stay)