Taia has been excellent, his efforts have been under-rated so far imo.
He's consistently one of the top tacklers, makes reasonable metres, runs very good lines which have a couple of occassions seen him make clean breaks, and can get an offload away. He'd probably be in my starting team even at full strength.
It's amazing what the name 'CROSS' does to the look of that side. I think Royal is suited to the bench too, I'm expecting a good game from him.
Also I imagine that when the team actually runs out, Hilder will shift back to the bench so that Houston can start. Unless of course it is a genuine selection designed to see Hilder the tackling machine go crazy in the ruck to compensate for the promotion of Paterson, combined with the fact his ball-playing lock skills would ease some pressure on hte halves minus Mullen (in fact, having just typed that, I suddenly think it's a good move by Smith).