I don't think that's true. In theory, having 8,9,10 off the bench was good and the thought of Morley, Carvell and Monas coming on sounds terrifying, but it often saw us slacken off last year. Only when Hill, in particular, came back on did we tighten back up in defence.

Starting props next year will surely be Hill and Woody with Asotasi coming off the bench in the Moz mould and England and Riley fighting it out for the Carvell role. Riley and England both have the size of Carvs so we shall see if they can step up. Asotasi should provide us with more availability than Moz and hopefully some of his leadership qualities.

I suppose the only question mark will be if Smith wants Asotasi to start?

You've never called it as it is. You make ridiculous statements and then shout others down when they have a different opinion to you. Briers, Hodgson and Morley all missed a lot of games last year and we didn't exactly do badly without them. This will be a season of transition, but we'll still make the top 3-4.

I don't think that I said that very well.
I view the prop/hooker interchange as the starting line up nowadays, as very few play 80 minutes.
The personnel changes for Wire will defiantly mean this is a season of tradition, and it is all just opinion at this point as to how that will pan out.
No one knows if the changes will make the team stronger or weaker, they can't.
But thats why we go on forums, to air our views, and argue the toss with fellow internet know alls.
Happy New Year to you all!

Last paragraph well put.

wasting your time with that mate..he strikes me as all mouth and no trousers...words are easy backing up those words are totally different

I personally think that the four first choice props will be:

Hill
Wood
Asotasi
Harrison

well, there's an incentive there for england and Riley, harrison is now on the back foot(looking at it, i don't think he was at all fit last season, or for the last 18 months) so there's a gap there in the rotation, also depends if we're going with a prop at 13 still.

Also, Ben Evans, he had somethingof a mixed game on Sunday, aside from a few iffy offloads, he certainly looks like he doesn't want farming out to london for the year.

Heard that Ben Evans will be staying with us for this season. May be to protect him from the uncertainty surrounding Bradford or perhaps TS believes we need some additional forward numbers.

Ben Currie looks like he'll end up ar 13, ball playing loose like Scully or O'loughlin in the long term.

he was trying to throw out a few a scully/lockers style passes on sunday, something i've not seen from him previously.

He was a half back at junior level

Leeds
Wire
Wigan
Saints
Hudds
Salford
Catalan
Hull
Castleford
Widnes
Hull kr
Bradford
Wakefield
London

By April or May I predict there will be a fair few users of this forum that are posting things similar to what Padders says. The big theme of the season on this forum is going to be "we made a huge error in the off season by not strengthening the team given the players we lost". The second biggest theme will be people volunteering to pay Asotasi's air fare home.

I think by the time a third of the season has passed, we will have lost more games than we would be comfortable with, including to sides that we would usually expect to have beaten, but I also expect we will still be in touch with the top because a few of the other teams around us are going to be in similar positions. Nobody at the top is really pulling away and the top of SL is slipping down towards the middle. If Huddersfield really get things right, then this season is an advantage for them as they are the team on the up whereas the others around them are standing still or slipping backwards. Saints fans seem optimistic but they don't convince me.

The stat about our recent win rate without Briers is deceptive (believe it or not, in the last four years our record without Briers has been better than our record with him) because this season we aren't just missing Briers but Briers, Hodgson, Carvell and Morley. Had we gone in to any game last season hearing that those four were out, and the replacements were relatively untried guys like Russell and England, we would have realistic expectations about that game and if we lost to a lower table team would say well its experience for the new guys, but we need to get the big guns back for the playoffs. This season the big guns are not coming back.

The optimistic expectations all seem to be based on the perfect scenario: if Ratchford and Myler have the seasons of their lives, if England turns out to be the next Chris Hill, if Asotasi recaptures his NRL form of a few years ago, if Russell's defence holds and he turns out to be the find of the year, if the centre inside Penny doesn't have shockers and leave him exposed all the time, then we will be ok but there are a lot of ifs.

There are other question marks in the team too: Atkins, Bridge, Michael Monaghan: are they the players they were when we were at our peak? All of them have shown signs of decline or patchy form, will this be reversed or continued? If its continued then this is another problem area for us.

I'm not panicking that we have become a rubbish team or are going to do a Bradford but my expectations are quite modest for this season: I don't expect us to win a trophy and I would be surprised if we made a final. I think it will be quite hard for our fans to accept after the good recent years and so I expect a turbulent year ahead on this forum.