Quote: Barbed Wire "Not sure this is fair on Gleeson. As a centre, his skill was turning 2 versus 2 situations into points. There were very few better than him at that, even during his time with us. That style of centre doesn’t often couple with doing the hard work. See Lyon, Gidley, Gaznier.
Compare with Atkins, who if given three 2 v2 situations would score one and waste two, but would carry the ball 150m a game and do a lot of work coming away from his own line.
The game is moving away from craft and guile in the search for seventeen 6ft, 100kg jack of all trades, but I would love to see genuine class centres who can create like Gleeson without comparing stats on meters/busts.
That said, the club becoming a graveyard for the careers of halfbacks is concerning. This is, in my opinion, down to having a pathetic front row. We have undervalued our pack for years. It was Hill and “X” for years. Sims did a good job of steadying alongside Hill, the rest of the pack were awful. Then it was Hill and Cooper. All the while having a 2 man pack. This isn’t a new thing, it’s been like this since Morley/Carvell/Wood left. In that time we’ve invested in Sandow, Gidley, Brown, Roberts, Austin, Widdop and Williams all on HUGE money but are somehow surprised when another one doesn’t succeed without fixing the problem, which is that we have Cooper and a bunch of cardboard cutouts in the pack. It’s insanity.
Good props are hard to come by, but the game is so difficult without them.'"
Must admit I had a chuckle reading the op the other night thinking that right side of Briers Westwood and gleeson (insert winger) wasn't one of the most lethal combinations for about 3 years in the league