Poor recruiting, especially to replace Jammer and Eastmond.
Signing Lance Hohaia as a half was ludicrous. Signing Laffranchi as prop was poor.

i thought hohaia was going to be a decent signing then he arrived and well you know how the story goes. Last season i think we over achieved in a sense and maybe certain people thought we werent in such bad shape but this season has been a big reality check surely theres going to be loads of ins and outs this off season there needs to be.

We've got a half decent tent, we've just got no pegs to hold it up.

We need 2 halves. Desperately. And for whatever needs to be changed in our conditioning to stop so many of our players being ****ing well injured so often. There's not a long wrong with the squad by contemporary quality standards otherwise and a hell of a lot more right with it.

By far and away the biggest mistakes we've made in the last few years were committing our future to Eastmond and Wheeler and dumping Smith (although I still maintain that anybody would have made exactly the same decision at the time) and offing Pryce for Hohaia (was a strange move at the time and just keeps getting stranger every week). Some of the other big signings haven't worked out (Shenton, Perry) but they were signings anyone would have made at the time and you can't really level too much criticism at them either - **** just happens sometimes.

Our recent coaching appointments haven't been great either (jury's still out on Brown), but in modern SL you can't sign a top-quality proven Aussie coach and there are few suitable British candidates so taking a chance on a lesser-known quantity is just a fact of life. Sometimes it works (Maggie at Pies) and sometimes it doesn't (Potter and Royce) - again, hard to criticise the board too harshly.

Basically, our management dropped a huge, massive, unforgiveable clanger over Pryce/Hohaia that we'll be paying for for another 2.5 years. Otherwise it's been a bit unlucky with a few critical decisions. It needs to stop being unlucky and soon...

Isn't it more to do with us being head and shoulders above everyone else and it being impossible to maintain that? I know some will say "well, we recruited and coached suitably well enough to get us that fantastic side to start with....why couldn't we repeat it?"

An earlier poster said we had four players that were irreplaceable and although we could argue that we may have done it with the hooker, the others we haven't. Even if you think this estimate (four) is close....which I don't.....then that's a quarter of a team. Add to that other quality players we had (Long, Martyn, Gleeson, Iro, Newlove, Smith, Fairleigh, Anderson), its clear that we (or any club) couldn't sustain that run of recruitment.

I think its also a pointer to our sport in general. I'm not pointing fingers at clubs, governing bodies, television companies, fans or anyone but when our sport's bread and butter players are earning less than me and I'm just a stiff with a normal job, then this must impact on the quality available. If you were as athletic as they obviously are and had some talent (which even the squad players do), then surely there are much better paying opportunities out there. The first and obvious one being Union but even just getting regular jobs.

Northampton's comments about the signings we've made that have failed to fulfil their potential is valid. I think most of them looked good at the time but for reasons we don't know (but will continue to guess about), they didn't work out. And lets not get misty eyed over Pryce. Not only did he miss nearly a full season for us when we let him go, he's missed considerable matches for The Cats too....although he did have a good game against us.

Anyway, we're having it tough and in no small part some of it is down to a run of injuries in the last two years.

By not replacing the likes of Long, Lyon, Graham, Pryce, this list goes on... Especially Graham, as our forward pack (besides Walmsley and Sia) must be one of the weakest and least driving in Super League, and without field position made by our forwards, it is near enough impossible for our backs to produce any attacking threat

Nonsense, plain and simple.

Long: replaced by Eastmond, the best and most sought after young half talent in the country by a mile. We couldn't possibly have found a better replacement. RU luchre and a little naivety on our part has left us with a mess subsequently but you can't argue we didn't produce a good enough replacement for Long.
Lyon: replaced with Aussie legend Gidley (who was at least as good for us as Lyon for a time until age overtook him) and then current first-choice GB centre Shenton. I can't see how anyone could argue about the ambition or suitability involved in signing those 2 players as successive replacements for Lyon.
Graham: replaced with 2 Aussie international props. Again: how could we have signed any more suitably or ambitiously?
Pryce: He was replaced with a world cup winning pivot on big money. Ambition there by the bucket load. No sense, but plenty of ambition.

Every player we have lost in the last decade has been replaced by the best practically available replacement at the time. Too many of them haven't worked out it's true, but that's life. Replacing the likes of Lyon, Scully, Long, KC etc. 100% like-for-like quality-for-quality is completely impossible in the current climate and we've done as good a job at the time as was practical.

This revisionist nonsense about us constantly losing players and never replacing them with suitable quality needs to be smacked squarely in the mush once and for all.

There are a few holes in your argument I'm afraid.

1. Gidley was never as good as Lyon , at least not for us and Shenton is worse than both. I understand though that replacing Lyon was near impossible. You have forgotten though that we let Talau go and didnt both to replace him until we sign Soliola who is more of a backrow. Impossible situation for right centre , unfathomable call not to replace a left centre with nobody coming through in the youth to fill either

2. The Ea$tmond scenario is pretty much down to p!ss poor planning, look at the Goons getting cash for Mossop because they saw his contract wnding down , established he wasnt going to sign another then did the smart thing by offloading him and they can now plan a replacement. Poor planning by the club

3. Graham - Perry was signed to play alongside Jammer so is hardly a replacement as was LMS. I accept Perry should have been far better than he has been so nothing we could do about that but Lafranchi (sp) who we did sign as a replacement is a second row convert and never a top class prop in a million years. We replaced one of the top props in the world with an old aussie second row ... hmmm. a gargantuan downgrade

4. Pryce - we replaced him with a bloke who had never been a first choice halfback in his senior career and had won a world cup playing fullback. A massive downgrade

The quality in general of the squad has been slipping downhill for years and is made worse by our dreadful recruitment.

p.s. I've not even mentioned the fact Scully retired and we never even tried to replace him

The problems started around 2007. The big stars was getting older and the club stopped recruiting. I was shot down many times over the years when I was suggesting bad times are on the way.

The club called it "going with youth" but I called it "doing it on the cheap". The worst things that was happening was our run of grand final appearances as it was hiding the problems.

Even when your winning trophies and was as successful as we was, you still need to build and recruit and we didnt.

The club for whatever reason lost ambition.

speed, I couldn't really imagine him as a modern second rower anyway.

Hohaia could have been a revelation at stand off. He had the pedigree and *some* experience of playing there. As it happens, he's a revulsion.

(oh, and wasn't Wilkin always going to be the long-term successor to Scully?)

I find your argument reasonably convincing. I remember the very positive reactions to signing Perry and Hohaia, and the optimism surrounding Eastmond. We're all in danger of putting on 20-20 hindsight glasses.

However, while I agree that the issue is that so many of our signings have failed to perform, that does then rather beg the question : why ? When Perry, Laffranchi, Hohaia and Shenton all fail to cut the nustard, plus an obvious drop-off in form from the likes of Puletua, LMS, Wilkin & Wellens, then you have to start to look for something systemic which has gone wrong at Saints. Whether it's the coaching, the conditioning, the incentive structure, or the culture at the club, there's something wrong when so many potentially top-class players end up being poor and/or injured at the same time.

...and as always we hit the uncomfortable question of who, without the benefit of hindsight and a time machine, you think would have been better signings for us to replace them all at the time... It would have been hilarious reading on here if Eastmond had gone to Warrington on a long deal and we'd been stuck with Smith instead for instance wouldn't it?