Have a top class fullback wouldnt have saved the dogs in 94. They still have marty bella, and he's the real villian in that game. They never recovered from his mistake off the kick off
Also having a new fullback, and front rower and who ever else you picked wouldnt have kept big 'Ozzie' off the park!
Of course it wouldn’t, but how many tries could
the Raiders have scored with a proper bomb-catcher at the rear?? They would
never have been in a position to score their first, and Nagas’ second would have been out as well - that’s
ten points as a start. More than that, how bad Wilson was as a fullback (except of course as a broken-field runner) was seen in how he missed the tackles that led to Daley’s and to some extent Nagas’ first tries. That’s
twenty points for you, plus the psychological effect of such mistakes which could be worth a lot more still.
As I have hinted,
the Raiders almost certainly
knew before the 1994 Grand Final that if they could bomb
the Bulldogs they would crush them - as they did. When Steve Martin at
North Sydney in 1991 played Wilson as fullback he played Paul Conlon in the centres and let Conlon take the bombs.
The Bulldogs, however, had been playing non-specialists at fullback for a long time before acquiring Wilson from
the Bears. The success of Allan Langer-sized but dreadfully injury-prone Jason Alchin (who left
the Bulldogs because he
wanted to play halfback) in that role during 1988 undoubtedly gave
Canterbury a false impression that a specialist has no value with the “handover” rule placing fullbacks more into the threequarter line.