There's a reason why Beale continues to get selected ahead of Loots in the centres. He has displayed a far better understanding of our defensive system than Loots and both Maloney and Feki have way more faith in him.
Birdee Num Num it is a ludricous assertion that Beale is "frequently" caught out. Centre is the hardest defensive position in the game and there isn't a centre in the game who gets it right every time, but Beale is up there in terms of consistency.
At the moment our worst defensive centre is Jack Bird. By a mile. He's running his own race out there and his first contact miss rate is far too high.
my comments, in all reality, are less to do with defense and more to do with attack
imo defensively there is not much that seperates these two players, they're both capable of misreads, and as you said, centre is a difficult position to defend, so why carve luetele up on two bad reads in the game preceeding him getting dropped just because beale was kicking stones on the bench
for the moses of centres who parts the shark park red sea defensively, go watch the first try i think it is vs the kiwis this year and tell me that beale isnt capable of some shit defense himself
Moving on to attack, which is the crux of my reason for brining this up once again, loots hands down is a more potent option in attack, he punches the hard yards off the line better, he has superior footwork, is capable of tackle busts and line breaks and has scored tries this year that beale could only dream to. Thats not to say beale cant do good stuff in attack, he can, but its not enough for me and relying on others to create the room or the overlap is something that is standing out like the preverbial. One on one he is basically 0 chance of creating any opportunity or beating his man.
The game against the titans was a tired one, its is heavily underestimated what value loots would have brought to that game, particularly in the early yardage stakes in the 0-30 metre zone with his ability to poke his nose thru the defensive line and get a good start to our set. Our forwards struggled to get back on side and we were going no where.
This alone is something we sorely miss at the very least
flame away
