This is my first post on this board so please be gentle with me !
I'd like to offer my view FWIW on Morgan Smithies and all the current hype surrounding him at the tender age of 18. Dont get me wrong, I think he is a smashing player and has a great future.he has an enormous workrate in both attack and defence. He certainly has a good engine. However he is as yet not a fully rounded player such as to be talked about as a GB player and as a successor to SOL. I maybe wrong but I cannot recall him passing the ball or making a clean break or putting another player into a gap. with the ball his approach is confrontation in true Wane style. I hope he develops some evasion skills. The same applies to the teo ther starlets Partington and Byrne. Still I look forward to seeing him develop into a fully rounded player over the next few years.
Any fews folks?

Hi shipmate, welcome aboard. I agree with you overall assessment of Smithies. It is too early to say what level he will eventually end up at. At the moment we are using him in the middle where most of his meters are being made with the leg drive after contact. He could easily end up further out and given the similarities to Bateman and The Pearl he could be really effective. I have never seen an 18 year old player who was the finished product.

I'm truth, I think the O'Loughlin comparison is wide of the mark. He simply doesn't have the same skill set. He's much more a Bateman type and I can see him going on to be very successful in a similar role. Not the finished article, as you say, but already better than many in this competition in my opinion. Big future for sure.

I don't think he is the ball playing type you could see from an early part of lockers career that he was going to be a ball handler where as smithies will be the next Bateman type to head down under

Yes he clearly doesn’t possess the ball playing skills that Lockers does. However is he a future leader and captain? Almost certainly. That in itself is more important. Next year we have Hastings anyway who will be one of the most creative halves we’ve ever had at this club.

Can Smithies develop the ball playing and passing skills like Lockers did? Maybe. But should he? I’d rather he concentrated on becoming a line breaker with an offload, something we really miss without Bateman, Hock, etc.

I’ve always thought he’d be a better second rower than lose forward, he’s very good at running the lines and plays a very similar to game to Bateman as previously mentioned. However second row has always been one of our stronger positions and with Farrell Greenwood and Isa we’ve got a good combination, I believe that if he wants to make that next step at loose forward he’ll eventually have to put on some beef imo

WAY too early to be saying that IMO. Let's see if he can keep it up over multiple seasons as a key player first, or whether he even stays here long enough to find out. It's not that long ago people were labelling Kibula the next Lockers.

This bit is the most important bit. If he develops the way we think then i doubt it. As i have said somewhere else. I think Melbourne were sniffing around prior to his new contract.

Greg Burke was labelled the next lockers at one point.

Shipped a nice ball out for Burgess' try at Cas if I recall

Yep, Connor Farrell and Kyle Shelford were also given similar billings. It's exciting to have a young forward playing well at SL level, but I wouldn't heap expectation on him so soon. I think the second full season as a regular stater tends to be the most telling, once they have had a few knocks, there is more reliance/expectation on them, and the opposition knows about them. That tends to be where they make the leap from 'promising youngster' to 'reliable starter'.

As good as Smithies and Oli P are in defence. Carrying the ball they’re both not there yet. Averaging around 5m a game.

This will come though.

Byrne has a great carry but sloppy in defence at times.

Ultra critical as all 3 are way ahead of where they probably should be at there age.

I think we (as a country) have a tendency to suggest young players should be considered for internationals far too soon. We do it time and time again, it partly stems from the sky commentary team.

Smithies is a fabulous young player in his breakthrough year. If everyone is fit and firing he still wouldn’t be in my 1st choice 17. Like all kids he needs to be managed sensibly and not over exposed otherwise he will likely burn out.

The second year is always the acid test for kids. At that point they have to cope with the pressure and expectation to perform how they did when they broke through. By then opposition know a bit more about them and the way Smithies in particular gets stuck in will be a target for opposition forwards.

He's been solid and doesn't back down, definitely hasn't let anyone down, same with Partington. I'd say nothing more than acceptable form at the moment. This isn't criticism or putting them down, I just want to see them to continue to develop, which they have lots of time to do.

Think your assessment is spot on. As with others, I wouldn't even be that concerned about trying to make him a SOL replacement. That style of 13 is getting rarer and rarer, and a like-for-like replacement of the right quality and at the right age probably doesn't exist in world rugby. I'm more than happy for Smithies to play the role that we were hoping that Bateman would've held long term.

I think it would do the lad (Partington too probably) to scale down some of the hype just a little bit. They're still babies for forwards, and whilst the way in which they've been competing has been amazing, the worst thing we could do at this point is give them too much responsibility too soon.

Best thing for them would be to have a long off season with no thoughts of representative rugby (don't think that's a realistic prospect anyway) then go into next season behind SOL, Burgess, Flower, Clubb and Clark in the pecking order. There'll still be plenty of opportunities for them.