It puzzles me why all the blame for our supposedly poor attack gets laid on French despite his attacking returns being very impressive since moving to stand off. I know it's not ideal, and I know it's not his natural position and a role like stand off takes time to learn but I also don't think he's doing a terrible job.
15 direct try involvements (mostly assists) since moving to 6 is pretty impressive and comparable with the best halves in the competition. I can see why Matt Peet doesn't want to move French onto the wing because we will lose that creativity by having him in a non creative position and his first 6 games he played on the wing this year hardly saw him scoring for fun. We need that creativity from a half and we didn't get it from Cust early in the year, that's why French to 1 and Field to 6 was the call from a significant number of fans.
Ultimately French's try involvements are impressive. Jai Field's try involvements have been slightly better since French moved to 6 too. It's pretty clear though that Smith's form has dipped though and that's obviously a concern. I'm not sure you can put that all down to French though. Good halves work with makeshift halfback partners at times during their careers and the best ones still produce the goods. They can still work their edge and create tries even if they don't get much input from their halfback partner. Even if French was the worst 6 imaginable we still have Field at fullback and some excellent players on our left edge. French has created plenty of tries for Miski without any involvement from Smith. I don't recall Smith making many opportunities for Marshall in the same way.
I'm not going in the other direction and arguing that Smith is somehow a problem. I don't think it's ever been that simple. Lets be realistic here. Our attack might not be too fluid but it wasn't at the start of the season when we had Cust and Smith in the halves. We were inconsistent then. We're inconsistent now. We had a tendency to overplay then. We have a tendency to overplay now.
We actually average more points per Super League game with French at stand off than we did before he moved there. Before the Hull FC game we'd scored over 20 points in 6 consecutive Super League game. Prior to that we'd only scored over 20 points in 2 consecutive games.
We've never had a consistently good attacking game this year. We've had moments. We've had games where things have clicked but at no point has it been consistently good. It's a season-long issue and I don't think you can really point the finger at individuals or even just the halves here.
