Boyd - injured and would have been selected if fit.
Hayne - suspended, and hasn't played the two weeks leading up to the test match, not the greatest preperation, I can understand why he wasn't selected. Wasn't exactly burning the house down with his form either.
Uate - far too inconsistent, especially compared to Yow Yeh.
Gordon - Was never going to be considered while his side is sitting comfortably 2nd last on the table, while Yow Yeh's team sits comfortably in 2nd spot on the table.
It shouldn't be a surprise.
Fair enough on Boyd. I missed the memo.
Hayne though has been one of Australia and NSWs best over the last couple of years. He's often done so on the wing of all places, and he's shown time and time again that he's up to that level. He hasn't been great this year, but he's a genuine superstar with runs on the board.
Uate has not been inconsistent by any stretch of the imagination. In fact quite the opposite. I'm not a big fan of stats in RL discussions, but Uate vs Yow Yeh is just too stark a difference to ignore.
Uate: 120 runs, 1058m, 44 tackle breaks, 10 offloads, 6 linebreaks, 5 tries, 27 tackles, 10 missed, 1 error.
Yow Yeh: 89 runs, 795m, 18 tackle breaks, 2 offloads, 4 linebreaks, 5 tries, 31 tackles, 8 missed, 8 errors.
Uate absolutely murders Yow Yeh in tackle breaks and offloads while being ahead on line breaks all with far far fewer errors. 1 error so far this season while putting in far more work says to me that he's the very model of consistency. After all that you only have to watch Uate to see that he's a stupidly difficult player to play against. He has amazing accelleration for a man of his size and strength, he has a low center of gravity so he's very hard to bring down. Technically and positionally he's very solid, he sometimes comes up with unbelievable plays (see below) and he's been doing all this for at least a year and a half longer than Yow Yeh has even been mentioned as a rep standard winger.
I'll just leave this here.
On Gordon, how a player's team is doing shouldn't come into it. In fact that kind of attitude is the exact reason we have an even worse selection decision on the other wing. Gallen, Snowden and Petero all made the squad. Last year Gallen, Tonga and Scott were all selected. You pick the best players irrespective of how their team is going, but all that aside Gordon has been our best in literally every game this year. If anything the work he's done in a terrible side should be treated with more weight than YY who has the advantage of playing outside one of the best Centers in the game atm.
My feelings on Gordon are pretty well known here. Gordon is a fantastic player, and he has been for a long while. YY and Gordon are more similar as players than Uate, but Gordon has been rep standard for longer than the mainstream media have realised, and he showed he could make the step up in Origin last year.
The only real argument for YY over these guys is that they wanted to keep the club combination between Hodges/YY, and that he's probably stronger than all of the above in the air. At the end of all that, he's developing into a really good player, and should play in the future for sure. But he's really only been rep quality this year, while others have been so for far longer.