Quote silver2="silver2"Who do we play in place of O'Loughlin and Hodgson if they dont recover in time?'"
Hodgson's easy - we put in Roby for 80 minutes, and we lose nothing tbh.
SOL is a much bigger loss. I guess that Currie starts in the second row, with S Burgess going to loose.
Who gets brought into the 17 is then a bigger issue. I can imagine he might bring in Lomax as cover for fullback and the halves, as I think Lomax is the only one of the squad who featured in his original thinking, and I don't detect huge flexibility from Bennett once he's made his mind up.
In terms of the forward replacement, I imagine it'll be Heighington. Bennett will default to NRL where possible.
SOL is a big loss, because we have nobody similar. But next week's game will be lost in the halves, not the forwards. Brown's done the job he was brought in to do, but isn't going to trouble the Aussies, and Gale continues to disappoint at this level. As others have pointed out, he's had plenty of opportunity in this tournament, playing behind a pack which has given him all the time and space in the world. But he's created little, and his kicking game has been very disappointing, considering what we've watched him do for Cas all season.
The real killer for me is that however underwhelming I find our halves, the fact is that I struggle to think of a better combination available to us. You could make a case for Sneyd, but I wouldn't feel much more confident if he was on the pitch than I do with Gale. Widdop is our best stand-off, but he's also our best fullback, and where he plays seems to me to be dictated by whether we think Lomax at fullback instead of Widdop loses us more than Brown at stand-off instead of Widdop, and I think Bennett probably made the right call on that.
We have a real dearth of English halfback talent in the SL. No up and coming equivalent of Sean Long, Bobby Goulding, Andy Gregory or even Danny Maguire in their pomp. We also have a big problem at centre, although I think Bennett has made a real misjudgement in favouring Bateman over Percival. Nevertheless, after Percival, it's hard to think of another international-class English centre.
These are real problem positions for us, and have been problem positions for some time. There's a good argument that we should make English halves and centres not count towards the salary cap until we have rectified this worrying shortage.
