Dylan Brown discussion

jamesgould said:
I think it’s been downplayed or overlooked to an extent that Brown is now our main man in attack. You just don’t give that sort of contract, length and money, to a ballrunning 6.

I think he’s got all the tools to play 7, he did a lot of it in the Pacific Championship imo. He also has the brains which is a huge part of it.

He’s got time to make the transition, but we are 100% backing him to make a Benji Marshall / Shaun Johnson transformation from ballrunning threat to game manager.

Welcome to our halfback for the next decade!
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We can hope and pray.
Not many thought that Mitchell Moses would make a good 7.

Brown has the skills to do it, hopefully the trust Newcastle has put in him helps.

In the second trial at the start he did show he can play both sides and control the kicking.
The big question is can he do it consistently throughout whole games and entire seasons.
 
slotmachine said:
It would be nice to be excited but unfortunately I have eyes and Brown has not done well when forced into that role with the Eels.
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Brown has also never wholly owned a team. He had been thrust in at 7 only when Moses was out.

Moses was an out & out 6 and took a while to find his stride as a 7 but now he is one of the best. As @jamesgould said, he has the tools, the opportunity is now there.
 
I don't think the number on his back matters that much as I think I've said before. If you came back from the future and said he proved to be a better 7 for us than Mitch Pearce was, I wouldn't fall off my chair. Like if we picked Sandon 6, Brown 7 vs Sandon 7 Brown 6, I don't care, I doubt it would change how they play overmuch.

But one thing we learned with Pearce and reacted to way too slowly is that there's a kind of 6 he pairs best with. James Maloney, Blake Green, I would hypothesise Kieran Foran. He was never anything like as effective playing with an out-and-out running half or utility at 6. He literally played better with Jack Cogger than he did with Connor or Kurt. If we had Jamal Fogarty instead of Pearce I can imagine him combining better with the likes of Kurt Mann at 6, Connor Watson. Even though Pearce was a better overall player than Jamal.

I'm not ruling out that Brown can do what Moses did because yeah a lot of modern players are "halves" rather than specifically a 6 or a 7. A lot of good duos are two guys who blur the line between 6 and 7 rather than a traditional 6 and 7. But also, even with all our improvements in coaching, how physically demanding the modern game is, etc, these guys who are relatively small and schlubby and not even that talented, like Blake Green, Chad Townsend, Jamal Fogarty, Toby Sexton etc etc etc end up carving out long careers anyway. Because the stuff you want your half to do can be demanding in these very specific ways that you can't necessarily make up for just by being a really good athlete.

I would be very, very surprised if Brown's road to being recognised as a very good 7 involves playing with an out-and-out running 6 or utility.
 
Is it possible we are rolling with the same hybrid setup we tried last yr? Plenty of kp in that first layer with sharpe and brown both playing that running 6 role? I like the idea of that better than sharpe organising and ball playing in any capacity.
 
The player of the three best equipped to be on the ball more with the other two playing on his outside is Dylan Brown, and it’s not close, he is the best of the three at the stuff you would want that player to do by a massive amount.

If it’s Kalyn in that role, it’s gonna be a long year.
 
jamesgould said:
I think it’s been downplayed or overlooked to an extent that Brown is now our main man in attack. You just don’t give that sort of contract, length and money, to a ballrunning 6.

I think he’s got all the tools to play 7, he did a lot of it in the Pacific Championship imo. He also has the brains which is a huge part of it.

He’s got time to make the transition, but we are 100% backing him to make a Benji Marshall / Shaun Johnson transformation from ballrunning threat to game manager.

Welcome to our halfback for the next decade!
Click to expand...
I seen a ball running 6 at the pac champs. He did a whole lot of sweet fa of the team management of that NZ team. I'd pay the money to a 6 if he gives us 4 try assists a game.
 
Bizarre team selection....Holbrook might as well had named Ponga at 6 and put Sharpe in the 1 jersey..... We know KP is gonna find himself in first receiver plenty of times anyway
 
I don’t buy that whole we’re paying player x amount of money therefore they must play 7.

Players should play the position they’re best at. Dylan as a left-sides 6, can be just as valuable to the team with the right 7 beside him. With KP in the side as well, the 7 doesn’t need to be a Moses.

Lockyer won a premiership with Shane Perry as his 7.
Munster earns almost as much as Brown but they didn’t make him the 7.

Look how well Brown played as a 6 alongside Foran as a 7. Just find somebody who can fill that role and you’ll get the max value out of Brown because he’d also open things up for KP, Lucas and Best in particular
 
Yep.

If you were going to do like a "positional value" ranking in which positions most correlate with success, the very best thing you can do if you're trying to win a comp, and/or compete for one consistently, is secure an elite ball-dominant 7 with with a great kicking game, playing behind either great middles in depth or one/two truly elite middle forwards with decent depth around them. Don't think anyone would debate that.

It's not like those halfbacks grow on trees though, and there are multiple ways to skin a cat. You can sit around and hope for your own Nathan Cleary - and if you were counting the clubs who've ever had better halfbacks, you wouldn't need two hands - or you can do what plenty of clubs have done and just get whatever elite spine players you can + try to find guys who can capably facilitate their game. Comps have been won by teams who have their best player at 9, 7, 6 and 1. Teams have won with halfbacks that are merely serviceable where the only two truly elite attacking spine players were at 6 and 1. We've just seen a generational fullback will his team to a comp in a grand final where both his starting halves missed about half the game with injury. There's more than one way to do it.

Will also add that the chat about "you can only pay a guy that much if he's a halfback" feels a bit like a reflection of an era where 7 premierships over an 8 year period were won by Nathan Cleary and Cooper Cronk, like it's post hoc reasoning I think. "We're seeing teams win with Nathan Cleary and Cooper Cronk, therefore, you have to have a player like Cleary or Cronk to win."

I would say James Maloney was the best spine player on the 2016 Sharks, I'd give it to Greg Inglis over Adam Reynolds and Isaac Luke on the 2014 Bunnies, Maloney again on the 2013 Roosters, Jamie Soward was the most important player to the 2010 Dragons... could go on but no one was questioning highly paid five-eighths when it was Brad Fittler or Darren Lockyer winning comps with comparatively limited guys at 7. Has the game really changed that much permanently that 6's aren't important? Or did we just happen to recently go through the one period in NRL history where teams have won multiple comps in a row and those teams just happened to have all time great 7's?
 
We need him to run the ball well, we need him to effectively unlock the attacking players out wide, and we need him to be a way bigger contributor to the kicking than he was at Parramatta.

Tick, tick and tick. If this is the baseline we can expect every week he’ll be a very good player for us for a long time.

Number on his back doesn’t matter, don’t care about the salary either honestly. We needed a genuinely class half and we’ve got one. Every time he and Kalyn connected it felt like something might happen. Well done POS for having the bottle to make the call he did and well done to the club for backing him.
 

I probably wouldn't ask him to deliver the State of the Union, but some interesting tidbits in here. Big one is that he actually would prefer to play on the right (better for his kicking game, has a left hand fend, will give him opportunities to attack a wider open side when he does move over to the left).

He's a rare player in terms of skill set in that he throws an equally great ball both ways and can step about equally well off both feet, if people are wondering why he's made talent scouts cream their pants since he was a teenager there's a clue as to why, but it kind of seems to me like putting him on the right is something that's been arrived at after consultation with Dylan, rather than forced on him to squeeze others in.

But yeah honestly seems like you could sit him on either side and it'd be fine. Modular piece.
 
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