I can't see any justification, reason or excuse for him to remain as head coach as things stand. It would have to take something extraordinary to turn this around.

I agree with the above that recruitment has not helped, but you can see he has lost the dressing room. Players who should be playing are being left out (e.g. Savelio/Thompson) and playing lads who don't deserve to play (Richards/Tasi). His press statements are an embarrassment and he unfairly blames the kids, shielding the senior players who are not performing.

Alex Walmsley is half the player now than he was last season and it would be interesting to hear what he has to say. I'm not suggesting anything by that, I just think he looks a frustrated player at the moment.

Another question is who would replace him and I have absolutely no idea who that could be.

The should be no place for Longy at the club either from what I heard few weeks back. He should be gone now!

I wondered how long it would take for him to self destruct. I haven't heard anything but I presume he's done something proper stupid? If it can't be said on here then I respect that.

This is the biggest problem, we can all huff and puff towards a KC departure but I can't think of any proven suitable coach who will have the strength of character to do do a major overhaul of the team(s) both on and off the field.
We are no longer a "top 4" team and McManus can't see the forest for all the dead wood hanging around, to improve our player quality is not going to be a quick fix.

I think we all agree that a change is needed but who exactly is available? As a club we have adopted a bargain basement approach to player recruitment over recent seasons, signing absolute dross in the hope that someone will come good. They havent. We then have a coach who has time left on his current contract that he only extended a matter of months ago. It will cost McManus hard earned dosh to terminate his contract. Then you have the option of signing a coach already under contract.....simply not going to happen because of the compensation payments, so then we are looking at off contract NRL failures or NRL assistant coaches in the McGuire mould looking to make a name for themselves. The difficulty with that one is that whoever comes in needs to be able to change the attitudes of the players currently in the team, so has to be able to command respect and get the current squad playing for him. Thats no mean feat for an unknown name.

Lets compare our fortunes to that of Salford. Obviously an underperforming squad who then brings in one of the most experienced NRL coaches in Tim Sheens. Sheens then signs some quality players whilst ridding the squad of the higher earning under performers. This is not an overnight process but obviously a very costly one.

They are still not the finished article.

Then add in the factor of a wealthy owner with deep pockets willing to spend his money. Then add in the fact that they have allegedly breached the salary cap rules for the last few seasons.

You can start to see what kind of hole McManus and Saints have dug for themselves.

Latest words of wisdom from our super coach

[urlhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-league/36267098[/url



still blaming Easter; apparently we are the only team to have an Easter.

He also says: Quote

"We're quite a young team regardless of what fans or pundits say,"

I wonder if he has some false birth certificates because we only have a few players that are u/23. Don't know what his definition of young is, for me a young player is someone between 18 -21 which if we use that benchmark we only have Knowles who has played a couple of games this season.

I've noticed his choice of words a few times now when he feels he's under fire a bit. He takes a bit of a pop at the fans. Other coaches will say things about understanding the frustration of the fans and that they've let them down etc but not KC. He talks about us like we are stupid and don't know what we're talking about. Somebody needs to have a word in his ear because we'll simply stop turning up at games and we'll have more 2/3's of an empty stadium turnouts like the Challenge Cup game.

The average age of the squad that played on Sunday was 25.

From every interview Ive seen and heard, the body language etc, it just seems there is a bit of an air of stubborness which is one of the worst traits you can have as a coach.

It's another daft piece of PR by Cunningham, but I think he's right about our team's age/experience. The overwhelming majority of the squad is in its early to mid twenties, and we only really have Wilkin and Roby who you would call seasoned pros. A couple more experienced leaders would make a big difference to this team IMO (Paul Gallen would do nicely

).

But are we inexperienced? Yes we have some young lads but these lads been knocking around a while now and played in the pressure of play off rugby, semi finals, grand finals, wcc and even the more intense world series.

I think we needed to replace sia and manu with experienced players but we went with young lads. Those two going really left a huge hole in our pack in terms of experience.

I don't think we're especially inexperienced if you look at each player in his own right, but I think we do lack one or two of those players who have seen it all and done it all over a long period - the kind of player that is looked up to by his teammates.