Trophy winning sides have a full high quality 23 including 8 "bench warmers". And that's even after taking some injuries as a rule.
Any guarantee Faletau is coming? Denton can play blindside. Is Houston really a guy who's going to drive you on to trophies?
Who's your top quality guy in case Louw gets injured? Not many guys who are top class opensides and top class somewhere else in the row if not needed there available at the moment.
I don't want to say there's no potential downsides here but, particularly if Faletau isn't coming, there's something to be said for this.
I agree with a lot of this, but to take a couple of points one by one:
I was under the impression Faletau was a done deal? If that's not true it might undermine a lot of what follows...
Trophy winning sides do have a full high quality 23 as you say, my issue is a) they don't do it by signing a shed load of big names in a couple of seasons and b) they don't focus on one area of the squad so disproportionately.
Houston is not in the same league as Faletau. But he is a proven top level Prem player who has performed well against top teams, and will not be unavailable during international windows.
Louw, Denton, Faletau and Armitage are probably going to be fighting for 3 back row spots until the autumn internationals hit, then suddenly all four are unavailable, Houston has had minimal match practice and Fearns has been sold. Back row is suddenly incredibly weak. Moving away from the back row to generalities, the second tier of players we need are proven players who are not internationals - Houston is one, people like George Smith, Brad Thorn, Charlie Hodgson to name a couple of examples. Peter Stringer, who we let go because he didn't play enough despite being our best scrum half.
Would've thought they'd be looking at halfback before back row/back three, though.
Yep. Priestland has been ****e and not used at ten and is now apparently going to be away in the international windows. Mate walk is a massive step down from Stringer. We were absolutely nuts to let Stringer go.
Last year we were essentially undone by weak backups when we had a lot of internationals away. We don't seem to be doing much with our signings to combat that, Priestland turned out to be misleading to be fair but that was always a danger.
