FireWire wrote:How about aged 23, when Fa'afili scored a hat-trick for New Zealand against Great Britain. Hicks never even got near representative selection for Australia.
Neither would Fa'afili. If Hicks was a Kiwi however he would have had a lot of Test caps, and tries.
Fa'afili was a decent player, but he was limited compared to Hicks. He was quite strong, and in his last season or so was making use of this more taking the ball up early in the tackles to help out the rest of the team. He was also great at taking high balls (probably his best strength) and a pretty reliable finisher as if he was put on the outside with 10m to the line he would duck down and dive in at the corner and was hard to knock out into touch because of his size.
What Fa'afili wasn't, which Hicks is, was an athlete. Hicks can play any position in the back line, return kicks, field a kick in the in goal and sprint his way out of it, he can beat players for pace and all round inspires confidence in the way Grose used to in his first few years.
