The problem is we have no hard men in our pack anymore, nobody to put the fear of God into the opposition bastards. Obviously technical skills are important but nobody is scared of us, they reckon we're a bunch of pussies. Nobody fucked with our pack when we had Fat Owen at blindside in the early 2000s or Vickers at lock. If any fucker tried to slow the ball down they would get ground into corned beef. Now the only bloke they're scared of is Rocky.
Instead we ended up having an accordion like Al Baxter or a rolling onut like Fatt Dunning lol. Let's import some 10yo Boer beef and give them citizenship so that 10 years from now we have a decent set of bookends in the scrum. We have some honest triers in Robinson, Alexander etc but are they really going to be anything other than decent but not outstanding?
I think we have some genuine class in the 10-12 axis in Gits and Barnes but since Gregan (shit as he was towards the end) retired and Whits was told to fuck off we haven't had a real class player in that position who has had any longevity. We've had an airport lounge of blokes in that position in the past few years, no one snapperhead good enough to make the spot his own so we put someone in, he performs in one game out of four so we drop him and try some other bloke out and they do the same thing and we just keep with the cycle.
I think our outside backs are reasonably decent but again other than Mortlock and maybe AAC (Adam Ashley-Cooper) there's no proven class there, O'Connor looks to be a find but let's see how he's going around in another year or two to see if he ends up with second year syndrome. Then you have Mitchell, Hynes and Turner who are brilliant one day shithouse the next.
All that said, I'm prepared to give Dingo a go. Let's face it he's not exactly working with 24-carat diamonds here. Let's give the bloke an opportunity till the 2011 WC. If he fails to deliver then fuck him off and start fresh.
