Over the last two or three seasons I've come to the conclusion that the dirty secret about Brooks is that he's... ok. I'll hold my hands up and say I continued hoping he'd become brilliant for longer than I probably should, and I have certainly revised my expectations down quite a lot.
Equally, though, I think the popular current meme that he is somehow unplayably awful is going just as far off the side the other way. He does some things well, others badly and his biggest problem is that he's quite capable of having really, really poor games. His skill set unfortunately puts him in no-man's land to some extent: his kicking game and personality don't lend themselves to being a game manager, but he's never been able to just play off the cuff either.
Ultimately, as a team whose best approach is probably to be planning around being genuinely competitive (ie actually challenging, not aiming to arse into eighth place) in a couple of years' time, the only real questions are:
- Can Brooks ever be a half in a competitive side or is he simply not good enough?
- What is it going to cost to keep him on the roster?
I'd argue that actually, yeah, he could be part of a competitive side albeit probably not the dominant half. I mean, Chad Townsend has a premiership and so does John Sutton - you wouldn't pick either of those as your top playmaker or on-field general. I'll get laughed at for this but there are plenty of other successful halves where I think if they swapped careers you wouldn't be able to say they were definitively better than Brooks - people like Jahrome Hughes, Michael Morgan or Luke Keary. If they'd played for the Tigers for the past decade I doubt anyone would think of them as highly as most do. I'm not saying Brooks is as good as any of them but he's not as far adrift as is commonly suggested, either.
What I'm getting to is that if Brooks is the second half on relatively low coin he could still be a valuable player for us, because we should be able to spend the spare cash on strike elsewhere.
The challenge is more that all our other decent halves options at the moment are more 5/8 types than genuine half backs - by which I mean specifically Doueihi and Laurie. They both need a first receiver who does the bulk of the game management and kicking work, which really isn't a role that suits Brooks. Plus we have inexperienced hookers who aren't offering much in the kicking game, either.
I'm not really sure where this leaves Brooks. I know that if he wants $700-800k in his next deal there's probably no value for us, because we probably need a 'genuine' half unless we do some very, very clever recruiting to bring in playmaking options at hooker, back row or lock. Maybe the Mbye/Doueihi experiment where we effectively play two 5/8s is the way forward after all. On the other hand, I don't think Brooks is a write-off either - and if the rest of the comp is undervaluing him perhaps there is some future there.
