Some of you have omitted Healey from the TL. Is there an injury that I missed? Egan-Healey double punch is a source of strength for us. My only issue is that Healey is not getting enough minutes: he should be given 30-40 minutes versus the 20 or under he's been playing. With longer minutes, he's shown what he can do against a tired ruck. I honestly think he could have turned that game for us when the ruck for both sides got loose in the final 10.
As for this endless debate about mets vs tmm, I'm of the view that we just need to accept that no matter who we pick, we're going to be at a kick return deficit vis-a-vis what we had with Tanwah. So the choice for 7 has to be more holistic. Mets has a longer boot relative to TMM, but that does not compensate for the other deficiencies in his game particularly on defense. One thing about TMM's game that is often overlooked is his defense. With CHT-TMM we probably have the two best defensive halves in the comp. TMM also has a good running game that was causing the riff all sorts of problems, especially in the 2nd half. So all things considered, I think TMM is the better holistic choice. We also need to remember that this is TMM's 3rd NRL game this year (4th if you include the cup stint at lock). So he's barely had more reps than Mets, and will get better with time as well.
But going back to kick return issue. I just think we need to accept that they will be lower than before. We need to just back our pack more than ever to compensate by improving our set distance enough to compensate for the lost kick return meters. Whether that means shifting our bench rotation to add another middle to the bench rotation and have our backrowers play 80, I'm not sure. But that seems to be a more realistic approach than trying to fiddle with our halves to get a few incremental kicking meters at the expense of compromising other aspects of our game.
