Blues 2019
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@SammyC said in Blues 2019:
@Steven-Harris said in Blues 2019:
@Dice Bourke still had more skill than of the 3 no8s ,so your telling me Saiili and Lowery were better selections..?
Saiili was mud and Lowery no better..real home town selections in my opinion ,if Mafu was that good, why was he not re signed for another season..?The problem with Bourke wasn’t his skills (which were exceptional). It was his willingness to do any hard work whatsoever.
The bloke thought he was part of the backline and spent the whole game playing that way.
I hope Vaea Fifita is reading this
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@African-Monkey I think bad hands is a St Peter's trait.
Just when Saili was starting to look decent, he left.
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@SammyC said in Blues 2019:
@Steven-Harris said in Blues 2019:
@Dice Bourke still had more skill than of the 3 no8s ,so your telling me Saiili and Lowery were better selections..?
Saiili was mud and Lowery no better..real home town selections in my opinion ,if Mafu was that good, why was he not re signed for another season..?The problem with Bourke wasn’t his skills (which were exceptional). It was his willingness to do any hard work whatsoever.
The bloke thought he was part of the backline and spent the whole game playing that way.
He was a fullback stuck in an 8s body.
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@Dice said in Blues 2019:
@SammyC said in Blues 2019:
@Steven-Harris said in Blues 2019:
@Dice Bourke still had more skill than of the 3 no8s ,so your telling me Saiili and Lowery were better selections..?
Saiili was mud and Lowery no better..real home town selections in my opinion ,if Mafu was that good, why was he not re signed for another season..?The problem with Bourke wasn’t his skills (which were exceptional). It was his willingness to do any hard work whatsoever.
The bloke thought he was part of the backline and spent the whole game playing that way.
He was a fullback stuck in an 8s body.
Liam Messam tightened up his game considerably. Bourke never did.
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@Dice Hey! You take that comment back!
But yeah, just as Saili started to play some good rugby, other younger players began to overtake him so it was a bit of bad timing for Saili. We needed him to come right about 3 years before that and so did he for the benefit of his own career.
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@Dice Saiili was stuck in the body of someone impersonating a professional rugby player.
Every year the Blues team was named and his name was in the squad you were just left shaking your head ..hoping it was some sort of misprint ..the Blues would have been better of taking the field with 14 players that’s how much of a liability i thought of him..and I wasn’t the Lone Ranger ,a former All Black great Buck Shelford thought the same way. -
I think with Peter Saili it was one of those deals where people were constantly enticed by the physical ability/potential and assumed they could fix him/he would figure it out. Alas it never really happened. Nick Williams falls into a similar category.
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@KiwiMurph said in Blues 2019:
I think with Peter Saili it was one of those deals where people were constantly enticed by the physical ability/potential and assumed they could fix him/he would figure it out. Alas it never really happened. Nick Williams falls into a similar category.
Sione Lauaki
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It's a shame about Saili as he was a dominant force in some pretty weak St Peter's sides when he was there and looked destined for big things in the game in his teens and was the same when he turned out for Marist. I also found it strange with the off field trouble he and his brother would get into as their father was a very strict individual who wasn't afraid to dish out criticism to not only his own, but anyone else performing badly too. Lets just say he had no filter haha
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@African-Monkey I remember Saili had the next MJ tag from some journos when he started out. That's a bit of pressure to live up to really.
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when the blues were looking at 8s to pursue, they were 2; Sai'ili and Fritz Lee.
I liked Sai'ili, thought he had huge potential, showed moments of his potential, but mostly failed to deliver, not too disimilar as Tevita Li.
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@taniwharugby said in Blues 2019:
I liked Sai'ili, thought he had huge potential, showed moments of his potential, but mostly failed to deliver, not too disimilar as Tevita Li.
This could be applied to brother Francis also.
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@Tim Any ideas for tomorrow's topic? Maybe we could talk about who was worse out of John Senio, Grayson Hart or Toby Morland to kill some more time?
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@African-Monkey Well we do seven months to go!
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@Tim said in Blues 2019:
@African-Monkey Well we do seven months to go!
Until we are disappointed again, or is 2020 our year?
Personally i think we should go down the road of the other thread and discuss butchers (people who sell dead animals - not the rugby players from the Blues) in the Warkworth, Mangawhai area.
Talking about failed blues selections is going to be a loooooong thread.
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Better late than never
Blues board chairman Don Mackinnon confirmed to Stuff that they had enlisted former Black Sox captain and coach Eddie Kohlhase from High Performance Sport NZ to head a piece of work they hope will transform them from mediocre to "world-class" in this vital aspect of professional sport. "Eddie is leading a project across the Blues and our three provincial unions to look at our whole talent identification, recruitment and development system out of school where we've been poor, partly because we've not been aligned with our provincial unions. "It's an incredibly important project to get us up to world-class in that space, and we're not [world-class]. The great thing about it is the three provincial unions are totally on board and want to create a system where, alongside the Blues, we are retaining our best talent." Mackinnon confirmed Kohlhase's work had begun on the project and he was currently in the interviewing and information-gathering phase. "We're hoping to have a preliminary report back for our July board meeting and finalisation by August. We're moving on this as quick as we can because it needs to be fixed." Asked if he expected the Kohlhase review to produce structural change, the Blues chairman replied: "It's not a talkfest. I'm hoping it will lead to concrete recommendations around how we align the four organisations so that we're getting the best players and keeping them and spreading them across our regions.
