Lancastrian wrote:
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?
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.