Sam Burgess goes back to rugby league!

[Joey Ramone]

Not just Mike (ex Rugby League) Ford. Looks like the entire team were pretty happy to see him go. George Ford sounded pretty upset, and Hooper's decision to keep Burgess away from the team was supported by young Ford, who sounded pretty pissed off about what had happened

Personally I'm just saddened. I've got a massive amount of respect for Burgess and I really hoped he'd do well and I would have thought nothing less of him even if he hadn't been a roaring success. But all this has done is turn him and other League fans against Rugby Union when really we should be supporting each other and finding ways of encouraging players to switch from one code to the other if they fancy. And I'm also slightly disappointed that Burgess chose to claim that Rugby Union just wasn't physical enough. That's because he was so inexperienced he couldn't get properly involved in the game in the way that more time in the game would have allowed. I'd have loved him to play 6 against the Springboks or Ireland and claim that it was wasn't a bloody epic physical challenge.

Edited by Joey Ramone on Wednesday 11th November 11:56

[Pieman68]

0000 said:

Doesn't paint a great picture. Didn't realise he had three brothers playing league back there, that must be a reasonable pull.

Slight inaccuracy there in the article. Tom and George are both still at Souths but Luke moved on at the beginning of last season - the article seems to suggest that they are all still together

As for people questioning his mental strength etc., I would suggest watching the Slammin Sam documentary before making any decisions on him. The story of how he cared for his dying father whilst a teenager and making himself a success in an extremely tough environment might change the way you think about him

[basherX]

fk it.

He's gone.

Lancaster's gone.

This period of madness is over and it's time to move on. Hopefully we'll get a cracking new coach and can finally start to sort our st out.

[Smollet]

basherX said:

fk it.

He's gone.

Lancaster's gone.

This period of madness is over and it's time to move on. Hopefully we'll get a cracking new coach and can finally start to sort our st out.

A few more heads need to roll for that to happen.

[0000]

Taxi for Farrell.

[Babw]

Pieman68 said:

As for people questioning his mental strength etc., I would suggest watching the Slammin Sam documentary before making any decisions on him. The story of how he cared for his dying father whilst a teenager and making himself a success in an extremely tough environment might change the way you think about him

Agree with you there, I think in his position it takes mental strength to say" I don't like this I'm going back to what I like", he doesn't need to prove he's got what it takes in union, maybe he though he did initially and was probably swayed by sponsors/management. He probably couldn't give a st what a bunch of failures in English rugby union thinks either.

[basherX]

Smollet said:

A few more heads need to roll for that to happen.

I suspect they're all toast, either from the review or when the new guy comes in.

Mike Brown summed it up well- there's a decent pool of players who need to be brought on and naturally they'll be some players who will come in but the rest is completely broken and needs rebuilding. Again. The Burgess debacle is symptom of the disease and not the real problem imho.

[DukeDickson]

Joey Ramone said:

Cheib said:

Massively simplistic but Burgess was built like an RFU back row but played in the centre (for England at least)....plenty of other big men like him on the park. Looking at the England Rugby League team all the squad players are roughly 85kg to 105 kg...Burgess is 115KG. Physically he towered over the rest of the GB RL team....much less so on the Union pitch. I was listening to one of his England RL team mates of R5 the other night....he talked about how Burgess for 90 mins could just detroy teams with his phyciality and his ability to do it repeatedly over 90 mins. I am sure he's got some amazing stats but when the opposition has got half a dozen blokes as big and a few bigger than you it's not quite so easy.

I know there's a lot more to his game but physically he was nowhere near as dominating.

This is true. He never exhibited the sort of physical domination that people expected of him. I think much of that was to do with the time and space he was provided in League to take the ball into contact. You just don't get that in Union, and when you're playing 6 you may well be the lightest bloke in the pack.

He was a quite mobile prop in RL being asked to play 2 positions (neither what he'd played in either code, with any regularity, if at all) for club and country, in
a fairly unfamiliar game with a big noose around his head.


As for physical prowess, that isn't a totally straightforward thing. Size helps, which is now more than ever a big RU thing, but it really isn't everything, as the saying goes .


ETA - As an old school example, when the fairly (at the time) physically imposing winger Tuigamala went from RU to League, he wasn't let near the first team at Wigan before he could prove he could overcome the biggest hurdle, which at the time was fitness by a fair distance.
Most of the lads that play RL are often talented but hardly the brightest pennies. Expecting them to play a fairly technically complex game at the highest level after a few months isn't really the greatest show of foresight in history.

Edited by DukeDickson on Wednesday 18th November 01:52