George Burgess??

Luke Thompson.

What would you guess your first choice 17 will be next year?

1 O Brien
2 Briscoe
3 Leutle
4 Hardaker
5 Ferguson
6 Lam
7 Mellor
8 Amone
9 Ipape /Smith
10 Nakubuwai/Mulhern
11 Holmes/Hughes
12 O Donnell /Wardle
13 Asiata

Possibly swap one of the back row for a prop , but I do think this is a position we will get some one in for so subject to change !

Interesting - would have thought Charnley will play on the wing Briscoe will play centre and Zak will play at FB. The MacDonald issue still looks unclear as well - if you keep him you could have one of the best backlines in the league.

The Macdonald story of leaving seems to of been put to bed with Lam today but all the same , as the season went on he was one of the quota spots I wouldn’t of fought tooth and nail to keep.
I was in 2 minds with the FB spot as Chamberlin has done very little wrong, regarding Charnley he didn’t feature very much in Championship , all be-it due to Inu kicking goals for fun.

The RFL needs to rule on DB's loophole sooner rather than later. Were they to ban the practice just before the season starts it would lead to a buyer's market with a much reduced fee for Nene (or another Q player).

My 17 would be:

1 Gareth O'Brien
2 Josh Charnley
3 Ricky Leutele
4 Zak Hardaker
5 Blake Ferguson
6 Joe Mellor
7 Lachlan Lam
8 Rob Mulhern
9 Aaron Smith
10 Tom Amone
11 Joe Wardle
12 Oli Holmes
13 John Asiata
14 Edwin Ipape
15 Kai O'Donnell
16 Ben Nakubuwai
17 Jack Hughes

Rob, your team selection looks about right for me too, both starting 13 and interchanges.

One interesting selection for Lam will be whether he goes for Charnley over Briscoe.

New additions to the squad, as we know, are being currently being mooted, especially in the prop position. It will be interesting to see whether the rumoured 2-3 additions materialise before the start of the season or whether they are drip-fed to the squad after the season starts, just as happened to great effect in the season just gone.

Squad wise I suspect we will need a bigger squad this year than last. We were lucky then with injuries, in general, and also with good discipline and modest player suspensions and we cannot guarantee the same will happen again this coming season. Then again, we need the right calibre reinforcements not just journeymen to make up the numbers.

Despite this we have a very good core squad and some good SL quality players are going to be sitting in the stands on match days watching the game having not been selected. What a change this will be!

I was 50/50 between Briscoe and Charnley, but I think I think Charnley is likely to get first crack at the left wing spot and that is pretty much the squad that will start the season(unless one of the incoming is a prop good enough to displace Nakubuwai). Hopefully when injuries start to bite some of the fringe players can play well enough to keep the shirts and keep the competition up.

For me a couple of squad players weren’t good enough to break into the team last year , I can’t see them being good enough this coming season .

Even though the backs look decent ,cant see much real pace in them

No, you're right. There's nothing electric there. There's no Jai Field or Bevan French style pure pace but for me there are a lot of other qualities in abundance in the backs we will put out. There will be a lot of proper hard nosed rugby intelligence and know how on display. Players who know how to win in tight fought contests of which, hopefully, there will be quite a few next season. We should also be very solid at centre, defensively in particular.

I'm ok with the ones we've got. It would be fantastic to have the likes of Field and French but players of that quality do not, as they say, grow on trees. Maybe for another season.

cant argue with anything in your post,and as you say the players we have will bring other qualities to our game

Decent looking squad 'lads'. Welcome back into SL and good luck apart from against the P&B