I rate Houghton highly, very good solid hooker, reminds me of the old fashioned hookers, however I do not consider him a creative player and if he was I think we would have glimpsed that by now in all honesty.
We all seemed to have agreed a team needs at least 3 pivotal positions some have the luxury of both the h/backs being creative, we do not if we use Horney..We now hopefully have a creative f/back (though very few teams have a creative f/back in SL!!!in fact I agree with Tompkin and Tansey (only average though) being a pivotal F/back, not particularly Wellens he is just a solid f/back who joins the line, ...!! I do watch the game ), so the option that gives us is 13.

If our creativity and points tally was not a problem last year, that leaves our defence as the area lacking. So that's hardly compelling evidence that a defensive 13 is doing the required job as it is.

IMO the reason our points tally was better last year was because we were putting away the weaker sides more emphatically, a fair portion of that down to blasting through (40 of our tries coming from our first choice forwards). We still struggled to open a good side's defence.

Would you say that would have been different had we played Westy or Whiting at 13?

Yeah, ok.

Regarding Houghton, Gentle made specific comments about him having to play 80 minutes in past and not having anything left in attack. I suspect this is more in relation to runs from dummy half but it will be interesting to see what he has up that particular sleeve (so to speak).

Sounds good...hopefully Gentle can work on that aspect of Houghtons game, would be a great hooker if he can nail that aspect imo.

or he could have a poor game and all the crowd get on his back as we have done in previous years to players and the web site is full of letters saying "get rid why dont we play the lad in the under 20s (whoever that is at the time)"then when his confidence is shot we can all say i told you so

All very interesting.

Wonder where this thread would have gone if Ellis had made the wrong noises

I suspect most understand Ellis has plied his trade in NL1 and the transition to SL [imay[/i take time, we have options in the h/backs so I doubt he will be put under too much pressure until Gentle believes he is ready. Personally I think he will make the transition comfortably, he will be playing with more talented players around him which I think may help his game, the only thing I think he may struggle with is the pace of the game initially but hopefully he will overcome this.

It's hard to say for certain, but given that for most of the season Westerman looked our most dangerous player with ball in hand, I would personally say that it would only be a good thing to see him as involved as possible and down both sides of pitch rather than restricted to just one. Especially given that it would be the right he'd stay down, I'd like to see him combine with Yeaman and Briscoe on occasion too.

Defensively though, in last year's team I think that would have made things worse, as IMO our pack as a whole and especially the front row/3rd prop weren't mobile enough, hence we were strong defensively directly around the ruck (i.e. when people ran straight at them) but then weaker once the ball was shifted a bit. Hopefully next year we have the personnel to 'swarm' a bit more and get more bodies into the tackle quickly instead of having to rely on one-on-one tackles too much, which if we mastered would mean that Westerman/Whiting would not need to be as strong in isolation as Fitzgibbon was.

I wouldn't disagree with most of that, especially agree with Westerman working the left more. I just don't think Gentle, being an Aussie, will change the system. I also don't see the need to. It's a system that worked well for Leeds last year and also works for Saints, Wigan, Warrington, Huddersfield and Catalan. I think it was more the personnel and tactics than the system, personally.

how can you separate the three, they are all part and parcel of the game

we need to lead, not follow.

Easy, you develop a system, devise tactics and your personnel implement both. Now I don't think the system was wrong, as I've said, it works for every other top 6 team. I think it was the tactics and players to implement the system that was wrong. Which strangely enough were down to Agar.