I think a fundamental question at the heart of GPS selections is this- do you pick the best 15 players in the GPS, or do you pick a side to win every game? Because those options are by no means the same thing. Do you keep established combinations in the halves, centres, front row etc. even though one of those players may only be 2nd or 3rd best in their position?.
It's a good question barbarian.
I have seen a lot of schools rep teams that didn't work together very well with reputed schoolboy stars shoe-horned into a Ones side and the Twos playing better as a team. Even when Kurtley Beale and Quade Cooper were playing for the NSW and Qld schools Ones with other top schools players, their players didn't play well together and the Twos teams from both states ended up playing in the final.
It was strange to see those two Ones teams play that year - their combinations were horrible.
But how can you judge a player on his ability to play with players they don't play with regularly without mixing them up and seeing how they cope? When they play for their state or their country this is what they will have to do.
This doesn't really relate to the GPS but in the ISA they have taken a different tack to get results against the other school associations. Because they have only one training session this year (as someone wrote in the ISA thread, though I can't verify it) they loaded their Ones team with players mostly from St.Augustines, to make use of their combinations.
Although they are the dominant team year in, year out, nobody claims that all the Auggies boys are better than the all the lads in the Twos.
That is going to the other extreme and there have lots of complaints about the treatment given to the non-Auggies boys and how it will affect their chances of state selection. [PS I don't want to re-visit that subject in this thread, please use the ISA thread.]
I can see why the ISA did what they did, but I also see the unfairness just mentioned. It would take very experienced state selectors to compare lads playing with and against Twos players from their association with Ones players benefiting from being compared at a higher level of play, and from the combinations flowing through from their school.
Yet mixing them up more would detract from team play.
Back to the GPS - there is no such dominance of one school, and it's only when there is an unusual year when there is, do we get complaints about lads from poor teams that year being disadvantaged by being compared to others in their position from the top school.
For the GPS I don't have a definitive answer to your question - except to say we have to pick who we think are the best players and forget combinations unless they are too obvious to overlook. Part of the assessment of players has to be how they facilitate others in their school team and add value to them, and shy away from individualists. These facilitating fellows play in rep teams best.
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