I've always been a Myler fan so at the minute him & Widdop for me.

I've only seen him play a few times but he has impressed me. I think he moves a team around really well.

Saints could do with someone like him. We'd be happy to take him off your hands

And how many of hear are regular half backs.

Luke Gale - plays half back but is no where near good enough for England. Would happily see him leave Bradford!

Stefan Ratchford - fantastic potential, but he's played all over the place this year which is my point in the OP

Lee Gaskell- as above

Rangi Chase- don't make me laugh. He's not developed he decided he was English when he realised he wasn't good enough for NZ

Liam Sutcliffe - great prospect. How much has he played at 6 (genuine question to Leeds fans) grey prospect for future 6 shirt though.

Stevie Ward - how much has he seriously played at 6. I've only ever seen him play in the bavk row. but speaking to Leeds fans they think he's a 6. Again there's the problem.

Marc Sneyd - like this guy a lot. But played half season at FB for some strange reason.

Gareth O'Brien - Potential but just doesn't seem to cement his place down.

Richie Myler - regular 7, but yet to convince me he's a test 7. Hope he proves me wrong and has plenty of time to do it.

Sam Powell - again great potential but played a bit at hooker. But I like him a lot.

Ryan Hampshire - handful of games, but could be an excellent half back IF he isn't moved to FB

Joe Mellor- like Mellor a lot

Danny Craven - decent player for Widnes

The thing I kept finding my self typing over and over again was potential, but not playing there regularly which is half my point. Not saying we should be creating international half backs, but in 5 years only one half back has come through who has any sort or chance of getting into the England squad. The rest are playing all over the place which is half my point. Why aren't clubs giving the lights of Sneyd/Gaskell/Rathford the half back shirt?

Sinfield played the best game by a GB/England halfback in a long time. I doubted him as a world class stand off, but I take it back. Based on this tournament if anything I'd wonder where all these defence-splitting plays have been for Leeds.

In terms of developing halfbacks my main bugbear is the obsession with pace and running games. Quite frankly a halfback who can run but not pass, control a set of 6 and have a good kicking game is not a halfback. England seem to produce an endless stream of halfbacks who couldn't organise the proverbial. Sinfield just showed you don't need to be quick at all to be a playmaker.

It wouldn't surprise me one day tbh. Unless Green goes at the end of the year I can see him moving on. We certainly have a lot of options coming through at Wigan in the halfback positions so he's got a job on.

If only Joe Mellor hadn't lost a yard or two of pace after a terrible knee injury a few years back I think we would have seen him on the field yesterday. He's still a good player but he could have been great.

I think a lot of the 'apprenticeship' time that half backs of yore had were spent in the 'A' team. Perfect place to develop their game after coming up from the colts. With a mix of back up/fringe players, players coming back from injury, older colts & traillists. That was a great backgrounding for much up and coming talent, now we have a fecked up situation of kids needing to be fully SL ready and lead a team around by the time they are 19 or left languishing getting the odd easy cup game and/or being dual coded/loaned out at teams that may or may not use them anyway..
I can't see any solutions to our problems tbh

Under the current model the season-long loan would seem to be the best option. For players leaving the Academy due to age, a year in Australia even at junior level would be a fantastic way to gain experience as well.

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?