KOB1987
John Eales (66)
For once I’m almost agreeing with your post in its entirety except for the bit about playing pocock at 8 so we can pick hooper at 7. It’s actually so they can both be picked, subtle difference but it is a difference.The Folau at 13 experiment was tried a year or two ago and was a pretty poor. When he plays 15 other teams have to adjust their game plans to try to avoid his impact from 15. His best games for the wallabies and tags have been at 15. I just can't understand the fascination with changing that. Any time he's not at 15, opposition bombs start raining down onto whoever the poor soul is that is now trying to fill Izzy's role.
Similarly with Pocock - he is so utterly dominant when he's on the field then I just can't understand the logic of trying to have him fill another role (that of an 8) when he isn't one. The 8 is a specialist role and a key part of the spine of the team, rigging something up just so we can slot in Hooper at 7 just doesn't make sense to me. Pick Hooper or Pocock - I even kinda agree with ^^^^ whoever it was that suggested Pocock comes on as a sub due to his history of not necessarily finishing games due to the physical attention he receives.
Pick players in their actual positions though, and if it means we can't have our two best on the park at the same time then so be it. One things for sure, we've tried shoehorning players into all kinds of positions over the years and it has not worked consistently, so why not try a different approach and have players play consistently in their actual positions (/roles).
Or we can just continue to do what we've been doing for quite a while and hasn't been working, and just hope that at some point doing the same thing will just magically yield different results.