He's been better than Clifford in just about every sense this year bar Cliffords long kicking, but has nearly half the kicking errors of Clifford.
Clune - 9 Games, 1 Try, 4 Try Assists, 2 Line Breaks, 2 LBAs, 6 Forced Dropouts, 4 Kick Errors/Kicks Dead, Tackle efficiency 87.3%
Clifford - 8 Games, 2 Tries, 0 Try Assists, 1 Line Break, 2 LBAs, 1 Forced Dropout, 7 Kick Errors/Kicks Dead, Tackle efficiency 86.5%
The bar has been set very low but Clune wins, add to that Cliffords tendency to go missing whereas Clune at least shows up for his assignments and directs the team around the park. We can't afford to leave it to Milf to direct everything as that's not his forte.
The biggest thing for me is the kicking errors, Clifford kicking the ball out on the full all the time infuriates me to no end, it's such a massive turnaround in field position and it puts us under pressure we can't afford to cop. At the other end he does nothing to build pressure on the opposition by forcing repeat sets, Clune also doesn't do a good enough job but he's been far better than Clifford this year.
Cliffords prior credentials include a very good QCup debut season (the less said about the standard of that comp the better) and being unable to hold down a consistent spot at one of the worst clubs in the comp over the last few years, said club has now moved on to Chad Townsend of all people and is infinitely better.
In any case, I actually do hope Clifford goes well because we need to win this game but I'm not convinced he's our answer moving forward. I think a lot of Newcastle fans everywhere fell into the trap of believing we'd found our new halfback messiah which has caused some overlooking of his poorer qualities.
