Re: Kyle Amor : Sat Jun 20, 2015 12:51 pm
I have a couple of theories on what's gone on/is happening.First of all, I absolutely think the club got carried away with how dominant Walmsley was in the first third of the season. This culminated around the Leeds game where he basically ended up taking circa half the carries of our entire prop rotation singlehandedly. Thankfully, that has been resolved somewhat.
Secondly, I'm hopeful that Cunningham is simply working the group to keep them all as fresh as possible. Walmsley is really the only steady presence in terms of workload all season. The rest have varied between next to nothing and big workloads. I do suspect it's with a view to keeping them all ready to go. I'd be amazed if come knock out rugby, we don't see Amor taking 18+ carries again allowing the rest to work around him.
Unfortunately, the third possibility is that it's entirely deliberate to limit Amor's work. If that's the case, then I have severe doubts over it. Amor when he takes only 10ish carries takes an absolute hammering (see Wigan away). He isn't able to balance his early hammering by getting on top in his second stint when we reduce his carries and the result is an ineffectual prop forward. When he does the bulk, Walmsley, Masoe and Richards rotate at 8 and 10 and Thompson and Savelio rotate at 13.
What people aren't recognising quite yet is that Cas away was the first time all season we ran with only four props, in order to fit Wilkin and Greenwood in the back row. We shifted LMS to prop, where he is terrible and it's no coincidence that for the first time all season, an opposition got on top of us big time in the second half. Wilkin going to back to 11 or 13 is going to amend our entire tactical set up and I'm hugely sceptical of us doing it but we almost certainly will. Amor's role becomes even more crucial at that point as he simply has to take 20 carries or we are reliant on poor go forward from LMS and Richards as half of our rotation.