I remember him playing for Rochdale Mayfield versus Crosfields in a BBC televised Challenge cup game shown on-line.

I am not aware of him playing for any Academy team?.

An exciting talent that has not had had his natural skills coached out of him.

I'm surprised that we've not yet tried the "Briers kick deep for Penny to chase move"

Yeah exactly, with young players we often get this overhype and then the player suffers from the backlash.

When Penny emerged, people were calling him "the new Offiah" after a handful of games. Penny didn't call himself Offiah, that was fans and media. But of course that provokes backlash because everyone wants to cut down a tall poppy, so as soon as he started to struggle it became the hipster thing to say "this lad might be able to run fast but he isn't a rugby player".

It wasn't just Penny...at other clubs Marcus St Hilaire, Leroy Rivett, David Hodgson all got a lot of hype when they broke out. Then teams start focusing on them and have film on them and it gets difficult. The real top players will get through it but it creates a layer of pressure for a young player that is not helpful. Penny went through a crisis of confidence not helped by the fact he got injured at the same time and the backlash to the hype was not helpful and probably damaged his career.

I wonder if it actually helped his development by remaining at amateur level for longer, and then only getting picked up by Swinton in 2019 after he’d spent a year in Australia.

Far too many youngsters get picked up in scholarship schemes and then can’t play amateur anymore. Therefore they don’t get accustomed to playing against older players, and playing week in week out.

He’s certainly slotted in well, and also glad to see that his injury hasn’t held him back.

A ringing endorsement for the old A teams or open age academy systems.

The scary thing is I think he can get better especially with his passing game and chiming into the line as an extra pivot.

It's tempting to compare the two because of their pace, but early doors Ashton seems to be a rather different animal. First off he can be trusted at FB. I don't think anybody would be bothered about him leaking tries if you swapped him with Ratchford. He looks a bit awkward going up for the high kick but you can see by the way he attacks the ball that he expects to get it and that he can mentally block out opposition runners. His action and timing are not as smooth as King or Ratchford but that will come with practice hopefully. He already seems to have learned about nicking the ball and I suspect it will not be too long before he can get his body under the ball to snuff out a try. Then there is his tackling. You would expect this to be a weak point because of his build, but he is actually quite aggressive. He doesn't just wait and ,accept the runner, or go for his legs, he seems to be up for the confrontation. I don't think we saw these features with Penny, although he was much better at dealing with the high ball when he returned to us from Swinton.

It's too soon to say, but I think his confidence, attitude and all round ability seem to be couple of steps up from Penny.

Imo ashton gas 2 things he needs to work on,(that I can see) getting his feet set under high balls, im more confident in him jumping to take a ball than him taking an easy (ish) one whilst on the floor, his feet are like Michael flatleys as if he's uncertain in his judgement, hence some awkward catches and collapses.

Also he seems to get caught at marker in the tackle quite a lot, puts him self at first marker and isn't getting back in position ASAP.

Lee Briers said this very thing about him.

Didn't Austin try it for Mamo late in the game last night? Or was that just Mamo being over-enthusiastic and nearly getting to the ball?

Well I think he has the advantage, like Chris Hill did, of coming in somewhat 'battle hardened' from the championship, in the way that players who come up from the Academy don't. He will have had old pros trying to take his head off and spectators shouting at him that he's poop so he will have had to learn skills to survive and thrive.

But its a small sample size and we don't know how effective he will be when teams have tape on him. Blake Austin for his first few games looked like Man of Steel. He's been good, on and off, since then, but he hasn't dominated like he did in his first games.

Austin has been superb since the restart, better than the start of his first season IMO.