molman
Jim Lenehan (48)
I suspect they do weigh up his strengths and weakness against available options. Armchair punters are silly to think they don't with a lot more data and insight than the rest of us have. I think Tate's snipping/running game often clouds people view of him with regards to evaluating critically some of the other aspects of the role. Tate's passing has been pretty well documented as a work on with him even mentioning it on a number of occasions. This includes not just his pass, but doing it crisply from the base as oppose to always stepping. A season or two back Genia was even helping him out with some of his core skill development. Aaron Smith is gold standard in this area.agree
but saying not to pick a player cause he cant kick is waffle. every player has all the facets, it is just some are stronger in one area than another.
Under a serious SWOT type analysis the W - weakness would provide insight on where the player could put some effort to seek improvement.
As for Tate, his strengths far outweigh his weaknesses, IMHO.
If you look at last years SuperRugby stats, Jake was a better tackler, including some critical cover tackles. He ran less, but makes more gain when he did. His passing both ways is cleaner, kicking is superior and he's generally more consistent across all the aspects of a 9's role. He's garnered a run of cards with the Wallabies which is not ideal, but if you actually look at them individually they are not systemic of his play and some were an unfortunate byproduct of him trying to resolve whole team situations (rolling mauls, breaks and line defense). I don't feel like his Wallabies performance were consistently his best, so the door is well open for Tate and/or Lonergan, but I really doubt Jones is about to write him off.
Tate shines with his running game (you can see his 7's pedigree), both off the base and in support. He had a larger number of try assists and defenders beaten and ran twice the number of times Jake did. This makes him an exciting 9 who presents as bringing energy to the game. That said he took more risks which resulted in more turnovers.
I'm pretty sure all the 9's will be aware of their work-ons (White's is likey to be less lippy ) and healthy competition can only be good for raising standards so honestly it's a great situtation to have vs. our fly-half/10 situation where we really seem to lack clarity and half our options aren't even in the country.
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