Barba is a shoo-in for Origin, but Scott Prince at the Broncos is a different matter Indigenous fullback Ben Barba celebrates one his three tries in annual rugby league season curtain-raiser Source: Getty Images Scott Prince in action for the Indigenous All Stars against the NRL All Stars at Suncorp Stadium. FOR those of us who are sick of the speculation about drug use and are happy to wait for developments in the investigations going on, there are still big, big questions in Australian sport. The questions I refer to of course are: What to do with Ben Barba and Scott Prince? Funny isn't it? This time last year we were asking how Mal Meninga was going to fit Daly Cherry-Evans into the Maroons line-up. Too good to leave out his supporters were saying. Play Cooper Cronk off a break, they reckoned. Twelve months on, Cherry-Evans is off the Origin radar and Barba is hotter than a pistol. Since its inception, the All Stars game has been lauded as a way for indigenous players to celebrate their culture. Someone forget to tell that to Barba. He thought it was an Origin trial. That being the case, he made his point big time. The message he delivered last Saturday night could not have been clearer if he'd put it up in lights on the Suncorp scoreboard: "Hey Mal, remember me?" Every Indigenous supporter in the stadium was delirious with delight as Barba ran riot. Except one, their coach Laurie Daley. Watching NSW Origin coach Daley unleash Barba on the NRL side, and realising he could soon be doing the same to the Blues, reminded me of that old (old, old) joke about the bloke who is told his mother-in-law has just driven his brand new Mercedes over a cliff and doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. On Saturday night it was Queensland supporters who were laughing, and, unlike the debate over Cherry-Evans, this one seems cut and dried. Surely no coach could go into a three-match series without Barba. His performances throughout last season and again at the weekend stamp him as the most exciting player in the game. He simply must be on the bench and fulfil the same role performed by his boyhood idol Matt Bowen between 2003 and 2007. There's no official title for that position, other than, "go berserk and run rings around 'em." So that's settled then - in the selection room of public opinion anyway - but what to do with Prince isn't so simple. There is no question Prince can still be one of the best organising halfbacks in the game. There are plenty of clubs that would love to throw him the No.7 jersey and tell the other 12 players, "follow him." It's just that the Broncos isn't one of them. They already have an excellent half, Peter Wallace, who underplayed his hand when Darren Lockyer was around and stepped up last season when he wasn't. A colleague this week suggested Prince should play halfback for the Broncos and Wallace move to five-eighth. "They could run the plays one side of the ground each," he said. Sorry, that doesn't work for me and it hasn't worked for other halfbacks either. Bob Fulton tried it in England with Allan Langer at half and Ricky Stuart at five-eighth in the first Test in 1990. Aussie league fans were ecstatic. The two best generals in the game, it couldn't miss. It did. Great Britain won 19-12. More recently the Blues selectors used Andrew Johns at hooker, with either Geoff Toovey or Brett Kimmorley at seven. Results were mixed at best. The thing is that halfbacks want to run the show. They need to run the show. Give them half the field to play on and they won't be able to help themselves. It would be like putting Mick Jagger on one side of a stage and Elvis Presley on the other and saying: "OK fellas, give us everything you've got, but don't cross over into each other's space. Now, Hound Dog on three ... That's not even mentioning the two other parts of the equation, young Corey Norman and Ben Hunt, who were touted last season as the future of the club. We all thought Brisbane coach Anthony Griffin was having a laugh at our expense last year when he said the newly signed Prince wasn't guaranteed a spot in the Broncos' first grade squad. If so, Wallace, Norman and Hunt would not have shared the joke. There's only one certainty about what's happening at the Broncs right now, and that's that four into two doesn't go. It's no laughing matter. Let's hope it doesn't end in tears.