Shaul? Every time I watch him he seems to drop the ball or mess up... he is a decent SL player, against Australia he would just get repeatedly smashed and exposed.

I guess Sneyd cannot have been much worse than Brown, and has a decent short kicking game which we lacked in the final... but again, he would get heavily targeted in defence.

Williams just runs around like a headless chicken.

Cudjoe has been out with a knee injury. Don't think he'd have been picked anyway. Think Bennett pretty much decided his squad 12 months ago and pretty much stuck to it.

Shaul won't get a look in until he develops even the most minute passing game.
The likes of Gildart, Sutcliffe and Percival, even someone like Jake Connor should be trying to pull up trees in 2018, the left centre position is wide open.

agree with the latter but Shaul if he had been in the squad would have been the best FB in the squad. Some bad selections

I don't think Shenton is a bad defender, He was once, but he is a better all-round player now. He and Gildart are easily the best two left centres in my book.

Agree but he'll be 32 next year so think his time has passed unless it's Powell as Emgland coach next year.

Which is far from impossible...

passing isn't shauls biggest asset, its pace and scoring tries other fb cant, against the aussies imo we need somebody like that, but we will never know because he doesn't get picked, sneyd is the best kicker in sl, with the pack England have he would be good imo, 2 man of the matches at Wembley proves he can do it on the day unlike gale, but again he want be given a chance,

I would say Sneyd has a marginally better kicking game than Gale, but his defence is even worse, and he he doesn't offer the same running threat. Gale didn't have a great World Cup, but despite recent criticism he didn't go hiding, and did show an improvement game by game. Of course he's not in the same class as Cronk; no-one in SL is, and barely any in the NRL. Brown, OTOH, offered absolutely nothing. Williams and Gale need to up their game for the future.

Gale's long kicking we great and regularly put the Aussies in difficult positions. His kicking close to the line was appalling and he looked scares ball in hand. Never took the line on, passing around 5 metres away. Asked no questions of Australias defense at all and we reaped the benefits of it (ie, nothing). Kevin Brown was anonymous which is a shame as he really brought some life into the team.

Many people won't agree but we missed Lockers big time. He calms us down and offers an extra pivot. No surprise that we scored more points with him on. We looked completely lost once inside their 20 and our halves made some baffling decisions - Kevin Brown shifting it left when they had the numbers there and Gale kicking on the 2nd towards the end for example. Lockers would have straightened us up. I also think we missed Tomkins as a link. For all Widdop's strengths and he's been good at FB, Tomkins is fast with ball on hand. How many times has he put a tip on to the outside backs; it basically cuts out a person and you either find a gap or get on the outside much quicker.

It's frustrating to lose because we had it and it's only little things that we did wrong. Being faster with ball in hand is key in my book. We saw that Valentine Holmes for example bought the dummy that put Watkins into space (saved by a Dugan ankle tap). I wanted to see more 2 on 1 situations but we couldn't get it wide enough quickly enough.

gale offered none