Harry Tyson-Wilson. Could potentially (ep, I know that doesn't mean it's guaranteed) be the next big thing.

Andrew Dunneman left Canberra when they didn't give him the head coach job.

He is the best halves coach in the game after maybe Andrew and Mathew Johns.

The abandoning of the reserve comp in favour of DR has hit HB development more than any other position, Championship Clubs wont take ' pivot ' positions on DR as when they are called back it disrupts the whole team

So end DR and replace it with more season loans, simple as

Myler is a talent, we'll see a lot more of him this year as he has to lead Warrington now Briers has stepped aside. Still young but with bags of experience, just needs to work on a long kicking game.

Ratchford isn't the answer I don't think. Someone mentioned earlier about 'range of passing' and that's something he lacks. It's all or nothing, he hasn't mastered to take the pace of the ball for a short ball at the line. Good footballer, with enough creativity to be a leading full back, but doesn't have "that" edge of being a class half.

Powell looks a player, if you don't want him, I'm sure there's a few clubs wiling to take a punt on him. Sutcliffe looks the part, thrown in at the deep end and went well, hope he backs it up this year and gets lots of minutes. There's still a lot of improvement left in Sneyd, Lomax and Mellor too, so who knows

The problem is a deep rooted issue that starts in amateur junior rugby, and then filters through to the academies.

Big, aggressive, strong and athletic kids win games for the junior amateur clubs, not the controlling half back types. Unfortunately, the tactics of a lot of the juniors at amateur clubs is to 'give it to the big lad' - it's all about the strong runners making breaks. Obviously you get the odd skilful player who makes it through, but athleticism is very much a game breaker at junior level, and the pro clubs are guilty of exaggerating this further by signing up the 'athletes' and making them even bigger/stronger which just widens the gap further physically from the odd smaller/skilful kids that might make it into academy. The big lads who are also skilful often have their skills reigned in, as the clubs prefer the 'athletes' to play mistake free rugby.

I agree 100%. I think we need to get rid of this need for a yard of pace, especially for a scrum half.

Watch how Thurston as a 6 and Cronk as a 7 play. Both need a big pack to get on top first.



If all this really is a general problem in this country, maybe we need to go and learn how they deal with coaching of youngsters in Australia. Do they still have the system whereby whereby juniors play in teams according to weight rather than age?

While superteds point is a good one the pro clubs ( specifically SL ) also do the same thing, they have their own ' super ' clubs at amatuer level where they push all the local talent , Saints have used Blackbrook as their feeder club , Scott Moore was ' Encouraged ' to join them despite being from Leigh, Wigan use St Pats, which is how Leigh ended up with Chris Hill ( he refused to leave his mates at New Springs when Wigan wanted him to sign for Pats )

And while having all the best talent at one place makes it easier to monitor it, it also stifles HB development as these HB s are already playing with the biggest strongest packs , this gives them more time, reducing pressure, it becomes ' easy ' for them

I also wonder how many half backs are chopped before given a chance because of their size. I'm sure i've read somewhere Tomkins was let go by Wigan at 16 because they didn't believe physically he would make it (Apologies if i'm wrong though)

But i have heard of other clubs, including my own, not interested in players as they don't think they will make it physically or they think they're too small.

Would the likes of Paul Deacon, Kevin Sinfield etc make it now a days? Neither have pace, but are/were outstanding kickers of the ball and organising. Are scouts spending enough time looking at this, or are they just interested in the guy who is scoring 5 tries every game as he is faster and bigger than everyone else.

The same can be said for out centres, are we just noticing the big, powerful 16 year old charigng through everyone because he has had an early growth spurt, or are they looking at the ones who can put their wingers in space?

For whatever reason Sinfield was rated as the outstanding junior of his time, so I suspect he would have stood out today as well.

Centre is also an issue, probably for the reason you give. Watkins is an odity, in that even though he's always been big and quick, from day one he's looked to pass as well. Again, I don't understand how someone can call themselves a centre if they don't even look to pass to their winger.

Even if amateur clubs treat kids this way, surely pro clubs can see the benefit of developing players with a real skill base?

But the pro clubs are having to teach them the basic skills when they should be polishing those skills and adding others.

Coaching has changed, but perhaps only over the last two or three years. It was around that long ago (I headed up the youth coaching at Northampton from 2008 until 2012) that we started being encouraged to run more game orientated training, more T&P type stuff, and the younger age groups switched to smaller sided games.
That takes an awful long time to filter through for the players that came through that kind of coaching environment to appear at higher levels.

Surely the answer to that would be to get these super-clubs playing each other more often?

A league of amateur super-clubs throughout the country, where the best prospects can play against each other, with targeted investment in facilities and coaching from the RFL and a focus on improvement rather than victory.

See that's only just starting to be pushed here, and mainly by the Leeds Rugby Foundation. It's still coming up against significant resistance though.

It's a hot topic in a lot of sports. The amateur game is responsible for coaching the next generation of players, but with the best will in the world the job often falls to keen but not necessarily skilled volunteers who do their best with the tools they have.

That's fine for those who want to play the game on a purely social level, but for those who have aspirations of being professionals and future internationals the need is for the top coaches to get their hands on them, before they start to develop bad habits in their game.

My problem with the amateur game is that it's not doing either. It's not developing players properly and it's not providing a "social" game. Without in-depth knowledge I'd imagine its a problem football currently has and is trying to change. Union at least has a great social aspect to its amateur level.

Not really, if you create an elite group of clubs that win everything you then find other clubs struggling to recruit players, decreasing the overall participation numbers, Barla tried to stop it happening, and the RFL tried to stop SL clubs stockpiling juniors in their scholarships for similar reasons

Remove the chances of clubs proggressing and succeeding and just like in the pro game ,you will see numbers drop at amatuer level

When you ask me about a classic half back, I think of the likes of Gregory and Goulding.
Something very major, aside from the soaring levels of professionalism, has changed in the game since they made their debuts - we moved the offside line from 5 metres to 10 metres.
Now, that change came a little before my time of watching, but I think its safe to say that the fact the defence didn't have to work as hard to retreat meant teams had to be smarter to break them down?

Should we be looking at having players of a certain age group competing with this rule? The change in offside would not only mean our players were learning their skills in less space and increasing the emphasis on running from deep, but it may also mean that there's less impact on their bodies, with forwards having less run up to bash each other?

Would this help, or would it just create a situation where a modern defence (even in junior rugby) would find it too easy? Could we push for a very quick PTB without it turning into a scoot-a-thon?

They would be playing at a different level anyway. There is a ‘top level’ of the amateur structure, a point at which you have progressed as far as you can. So adding another level on top of that wouldn’t have the effect you are describing.

Besides we are talking about junior levels which by their very nature are transient. U15’s are only UI15s for 1 year.

The change from 5m to 10m was because defences started getting up too quickly. I don't think it's made more space. If anything, there is less time and space nowadays because of the focus on defences getting up. If I watch RL from the olden days, defences didn't move up quickly and let attackers come to them.

Some of the attacking moves from those days seemed quite poor compared to what you see even in the amateurs and juniors nowadays. We see much more use of support play (one alongside and one out the back) and dummy runners nowadays.

If I was coaching and the rule changed to five metres rather than ten, I'd focus my coaching on linespeed. If we had that working quickly from just five metres back, we could create significant pressure, force errors and from there get good field position. On attack, to limit the exposure to that pressure, we'd play very safe, focussing on jumping from acting half and getting the acting half to the first defender with a support player before the second defender could close that gap.

So a (very) negative effect.

When I played primary school RL in York 20 odd years ago they had a pretty good set of rules in my opinion.

It was 10-a-side (missed out 2 centres and the loose forward, though you could do other combinations).
3 points for a try if there were fewer than 3 passes in the play. 5 points if more than 3.
It'd be a turnover if the acting half was tackled with the ball.

A couple of simple changes led to much more focus on passing and handling.

That's just the kind of mini-game we try to run as part of coaching now, although smaller sided, short duration during a session. Then there are all sorts of variations of rules. I found these could be good for halfbacks and some players, but the downside would be other players would revert to type. Just a case of different players responding to different coaching methods I guess.

' Elitism ' , just what the junior game needs

Yep it's what we do and have been doing for years. Fortunately Leeds are pushing it hard now so hopefully it might get through to some.

The good thing with that example I gave in York was that that was the league rules. So it meant each team was practising that set of rules instead of just the teams with "good" coaches. Admittedly it was only a small league structure (8 teams in total if I remember correctly), but with 10-a-side teams it meant everyone had to be able to pass to an ok standard (as much as you could with a school team) and we even got a few scrum moves going! Only basic like a run around or bringing the full back in to the line but without those rules it would have been more tempting to put a big fast lad at 1st receiver instead.