Poching seems happy with your squad depth https://www.skysports.com/rugby-league/ ... the-future

Poching seems happy with your squad depth https://www.skysports.com/rugby-league/ ... the-future

A good player in whatever position is as crucial as every other one. In fact, I'll go further and say a ball-playing loose forward is the least important position.

Better than a gifted full-back, when they are often the difference in attack between two well-matched sides?
More crucial than a good half-back or hooker?
Better than a gifted second-rower making hay down the flanks, like Solomona?
More crucial than a centre with vision alongside a winger with speed and finishing?
More crucial than a barnstorming, tough-tackling prop?

I'd say a ball-handling loose forward is the least important. They won't create a strong pack out a weak pack and they won't have the vision of a wily half-back. I can't recall ever leaving a game and thinking, "if only we had a ball-playing loose forward". I've left plenty thinking, "our half-backs went missing today" or "our props aren't big enough" or "is he really our best full-back?"

Sinfield is probably the recent exception in terms of making a side, but he played plenty of games at half-back and his strength was his kicking game, not his ball-handling.

As for speed, not crucial for a half-back if they have the hands, feet and vision.

Well slugger I’ll have to disagree on a few points .Danny Brough was as good a half back as anywhere in the league until he lost a yard of pace at the back end of his stint with us ,head could do it but the legs couldn’t ,can’t beat pace I’m afraid ,especially in the half’s n hookers.Westerman at times was head and shoulders our best player on the field at loose forward this last season and will be missed , that magic triangle with the half’s ,get that right and your going places .just look back at your sculthorpe,Farrell combinations ,world class . But you certainly need a decent squad around these players to take advantage and it’s certainly not a cert at getting that combination right and that’s where the coach earns his coin for me .For me I’m interested who will partner hood and who gets the loose forwards birth ,the rest have picked themselves.

Tend to agree. It’s just my opinion but I think a lot of people are living in the past looking for a game that doesn’t exist.

So I’ll go even further than you, I don’t think the position of LF exists anymore or at least not in the sense that some think.

I don’t even think I’m being radical, if you listen to the coaches they are telling us, or the smart one are.

As far as I can see there are only two kinds of forward. Middles, basically props and the more straight up SR’s and wide players.

Hookers, SH’s and SO’s are virtually indistinguishable and will often swap rolls as the game demands. Wingers and FB’s are another.

For me only centres seem to have a truly specialist roll anymore.

This imho is due to three things. A distinct lack of talent, especially creative and big lads with heart. Cost of a quality squad of over 30 players and as yet no reserve comp to pick from, this is changing I know. Injuries, in the old days tough men who needed the money often played half there careers with injuries that should have retired them, now we don’t play injured players.

The latter is the right thing to do but it comes with a huge cost. What other industry can afford an asset like Tupou sat on the bench for over a year. In a normal industry he’d be shipped out and replaced with new. This is effectively what used to happen until proper contract became enforced.

As I say the right thing to do but in financial and playing terms it’s a huge burden.

Hence the aim to slim down speciality players with multiple-roll players. You can bemoan the lack of these players all you want but they are a luxury and most clubs can only afford a few.

That’s how I see it and that’s how any coach of a smaller club has to see it. So for me we persevere with players like Abrahams in the hope that we manage to produce the sort of player we can’t afford to buy.

Just my opinion

Sinfield, O’Loughlin, Farrell, Sculthorpe, Hanley.

All revered as outstanding players.

All ball handling 13’s.

To me a ball handing 13 is one that does all of the above, he tends to be the complete play hence the reason all the above lads played multiple positions and played them at fantastic level.

Westerman when he joined us added a different dimension to how we played. He created a link between the backs and forwards which had been missing and this is exactly what a good ball handing 13 does.

Sadly it’s an art which is very much on an outer. I think Westerman is probably the only one that remains in SL. The tendency to run with a 3rd prop at 13 is one that is for me a very negative tactic.

In relation to Charlie he seems to play as a strike half from what I have seen on him, like Miller. Strike halves generally rely on having a bit of pace. I agree in some circumstances halves can rely on other aspects of their game such as Liam Finn for example who was the midfield general who guided us round the park and complimented Miller so well, leaving him to play that strike role.

For me the young lad lacks the pace to be a strike half but he has the pace, potential and frame on which to develop into a very good 13.

It’s all immaterial, and I don’t mean any disrespect to the young man with my comments. Ultimately he is another good young player coming through the ranks of what is becoming a very successful development pathway at the club and I’ve no doubt the club will do what is best for him in regards to nurturing his talent.

On the subject of young Charlie ,in the term his future may not lie at wakefield ,both lee briers and Luke Gale amongst others left bigger clubs to hone their skill at a perceived lower club to get quality game time ,and it didn’t turn out too shabby for either in the long run .Its a huge step up for players to super league which can have an adverse affect on young players at such an early time in their development.Just look at young trueman , arrived on the scene and hailed as the new messiah at Cas ,then injuries and inconsistencies have plagued him this last season, hopefully he will kick on and get back to his best ,but it’s tough at the top with no place to hide .Then on the other hand you have young Harry Newman ,even though a badly broken leg had curtailed him short term but he has got back on the horse and looking at him on Boxing Day he’s taken to rugby like a duck to water and IMO the world is his oyster . What I’m aiming at is that players develop at different rates and it a fine line between making it and falling short ,some just take a little longer to reach the top of the pile that’s all ,and some just don’t, but it doesn’t make them a bad player .For me Westerman lost his way over the years for various reasons and never hit the dizzy height he deserved, but his time at wakefield seems to rejuvenated his appetite for the game and hope he goes well for Cas ,as the game is crying out for quality players whichever club they turn out for ,as we need a exciting super league after the disruption we’ve endured to get the fans appetite back for the game and get the footfall back into the grounds .

I don’t want to be argumentative on this one but all those players belong to a different era.

We're unbeaten this year !

An era where fans were packed in watching scrums being contested ,loose forwards plying their trade ,rough tough no compromise forwards ,bring those days back for me ,real characters which have now been that diluted the game isn’t a patch on the old ways . Piling out of the mines on a week night to watch cas n wakey at a packed weldon rd n watching Joiner ,steadman , nikau plying their trades, the first time I saw dereck fox kicking sideways at rovers I was mesmerised ,brilliant times not to be repeated I’m afraid ,and there lies the problem . After all RL was setup out of the Mills ,mines and factories of the then northern powerhouse .I’m all for player welfare and there is no place for head high tackles in the sport ,but if we carry on diluting it down it will be no more than touch and pass .Bring back the Biff I say bring back the knocker Norton’s the sorensons bring back the characters and bring back the excitement,I feel like my children/ grandchildren have been cheated to some extent watching the modern era

I totally know what you mean but where I disagree is that there is any appetite for biff now. Call it woke or snowflakes or whatever but it simply wouldn’t be accepted now.

I’m all for representing the past as it was and accepting it was acceptable for the era. However I also accept that what was once ok no longer acceptable.

It’s a bit like comedies from the seventies, the blatant racism doesn’t concern me in the least and I can still watch and laugh, I accept they were of their time and shouldn’t be judged. If though they were to make a new comedy series with the same casual racism in now I’d be outraged!

We can learn from and enjoy the past good and bad but we can’t bring it back into a world where it no longer belongs.

So I enjoy my RL now every bit as much as I did, it’s just different.

There may come a point where the aggression and risk factor has been so watered down it no longer is RL but I think we at some way off that for now.

Your memory is failing you on the scrums. They were awful and usually ended in a penalty. I'm all for contested scrums again, but they need to be done properly.

As for the ball playing 13 conversation, it's a talent that be anywhere. But the core values of the player have to be there first.
Westerman was good for us because he ran the ball better than most in every game, and tackled hard in the middle every game. His ball playing was good but without the first two we'd have soon dropped him.
Pitts, Crowther and Arona can all do it but I'm not sure Pitts can run and tackle the same in the middle as on the edge, Crowther is less confident with pass and doesn't make the ground Westy did and Arona has lost some pace after injury.
I'd like and of them to step into that role. We don't need to bring one in...... Unless the next Farrell or Hanley knocks on the door.

But we are debating the importance of the position, not the individual talent of a small number of individuals, which are two different things, in reality.

And the people you’ve mentioned perhaps undermine your argument, because the ball-handlers you mentioned are about them as players, not position.

In most cases, loose forwards are centres who have talent that is wasted on the fringes and don’t mind the rough stuff, so they bulk up and move to thirteen. That is a well-trodden path, trodden by Farrell, Ellis, Westwood, Westerman, Hanley and many others. As they slow down further, and bulk up more, they gradually move through the pack to the front row.

As for the names you’ve mentioned, Farrell spent as much time in the centre, second row and front row as he did at loose forward. Thirteen was just one of his spots, so it was about utilising Farrell in the best way, not about the importance of the loose forward position, and the importance of the position was your argument.

Sculthorpe was a good player and captain, but I would suggest that the success of Saints was much more down to players like Sean Long and Keiron Cunningham than the importance of having a good loose forward.

Sinfield’s strength was his kicking game, not his handling.

Hanley was a unique individual. I held my breath for what individual feat of brilliance he would come up with, not for who he passed to or for the space he created for others.

As for speed for a half-back, it is important but not essential. Broughy lost some of his game when he lost his speed, but his game was partly about speed. Adam Reynolds was the slowest half-back in the NRL last year but also probably the best. He had everything else and was surrounded by people with speed. His job was to make the space for others, not for himself.

As for the player that led to this discussion, I haven’t seen him play so I can’t comment. It’s just off-season debate because we just need to talk about rugby!

The problem is that the world has changed too.

I agree that I preferred the game when it was tougher and rougher, because that was part of the spectacle. But medical advances have meant that we have a greater understanding of the effect of repeated concussions, and that has an effect on how we can grow the game.

In terms of the world, people don’t do those tough jobs anymore. They work in offices in cleaner and safer environments. Even the physically tough workplaces, like building sites, there is a greater emphasis on employee safety.

So, in this safer, cleaner world, how could someone sell playing the game to the parents of small children if it was played like it was back in the seventies and eighties? Can you imagine trying to persuade a school welfare officer that they should encourage rugby league amongst the pupils? As an example, if you wanted to bring a former professional to a school to tell small children to play rugby league, the person you wouldn’t perhaps ask is Stevie Ward.

For the game to grow, or at least carry on, we needs lots of children to play it, as that is the future talent pool. To persuade parents, we need to make it safer.

I agree, the spectacle regarding toughness and brutality isn’t the same, but it’s adapt or die, I think.

Yup. They had to bring in the differential penalty because of the routine nature of penalties from scrums, to stop games becoming about who kicked most penalties.

And scrums never can become clean, because you're dealing with twelve very competitive blokes all pushing and shoving each other. They either get messy, or they get penalised, or they don't compete. There's no middle, tidy ground really.

My 12 and 10 year old grandchildren play both football and recently rugby and have took to the latter like ducks to water and much prefer the physical side of rugby . They have played football since they could walk as they have a football mad dad but my daughter is a chip off the old block and both kids play for wakefield hawks and eastmoor respectively .Two many football kids go for their parents to tick a box and are at best playing under duress from the parent.,much to my son in laws distaste as he has coached football for years. Kids don’t do rugby half hearted and he openly admits that the tv image of football stars falling like they’ve been shot by a sniper has been creeping into the game for a year or two .He tells plenty of football parents that their child’s two left feet are a hinderance in round ball sport but go and try rugby ,of which out of one durkar devil team 5 are now playing RL to a good standard .My grandson broke his forearm in the first few minutes of a game at siddal ,has it put him off NO he loves it and was upset at missing 6 games . Plenty of kids will be breaking limbs on their scooters in the coming weeks and months ,it’s life get on with it . Kids need to be more resilient not stuck in from of the x box or doing a dive at football to appease their parents . Safer cleaner world ( COVID) never in the history of man kind have we been so terrified of an infection which for the vast majority is like a Sunday morning hangover after a Saturday night session . Don’t get me started on the woke brigade ,I truly fear for what this country is turning into .As sad as it is to see stevie wards medical condition he is only a small percentage of people in Rl who have suffered early in his career with the effects of concussion.Any physical work catches up with you sooner or later as my replacement knees are testament to ,that the life I chose and I regret nothing and rugby is no different,make them aware and then they can make the choice,just look at boxing and MMA where they knock 7 bells out of each other ,even the woman. So let’s get RL in perspective, it’s certainly tough but the vast majority come out the other end no worse than me but with much bigger rewards .