Northampton we know you see the league as ho hum. But the board see the league as their major generation of income. Winning a GF but poor performances for the first quarter of a season, would lead to fans following suit and not renewing season tickets in favour of picking games and backloading the season, just to watch the playoff run in.

Saints as all sports clubs is a business, letting the start of the season slide, would lead to letting income slide. The board have seen what income they can generate and letting the current form continue would be akin to Barrings bank saying hey nick, just go on as you are and try and recover all that money we have invested.

It's money that is the governing factor for Saints as a club. That stadium did not come for free and profits are the only way the board will get their money back.

It's not about god given rights, we have not won the GF for 5 years.

It's about a poorly structured side, the facts are clear, it's our worst run of form for 20 years. Even the mighty Murphy was removed by Saints. So removing Royce for poor form is not totally alien.

Other teams sack coaches far more often. Wigan got to the GF with big Frank and still sacked him, he did not even get to the next season. Brian noble got wigan out of relegation and into contenders, sacked. Bluey got Leeds to be GF winners has one season out of the GF and gets bumped out the team by brain mac.

Don't pretend this is anything other than the club protecting itself the only way it can within the rules.

Simmons going is no surprise, Purtil derparting is.
I'd have though Purtil might have stepped up to the head coach's job.
Does this mean that who ever is lined up has demanded he brings his own assistant with him?
Noble head coach and bringing Jon Sharp as asst?

You have no memory, clearly. We were hopeless in the early part of last season. Fans booed then too. But hey, we won our last 10 games, narrowly lost in the CC semi (as we had done in the previous two years also, under Potter), finished third and got to the GF, putting out probably our best performance there since 2006 and unlucky to be undone by injuries plus a Meli/Soliola combo on the wing (Christmas for Sinfield).

Whatever way you dress it, unless there's been serious ructions behind the scenes (and who knows what has gone on), this is a mad, panicy, knee-jerk reaction which defies any logical analysis. Whatever Royce's pros and cons, he's a coach with a proven ability to get a team up for it at the business end of a season and who will now be, almost certainly with no experienced alternatives available, replaced with someone with no experience in the role at all who might turn out to be an absolute disaster. We would have had a more successful season keeping Royce than bringing in KC 8 games in to have a crack at it with at least 75% certainty. If Saints sell a few more tickets as KC Fever bites then great, but the decision is still lunacy and will probably be to the detriment of the rest of our season performance-wise, which is what concerns me and hopefully every other fan over financial issues at the club every time.

Finance is the club, more finance the better the club is doing. Royce had his chances. This is not knee jerk. How many games should we loose before it's not knee jerk. We lost 7 in the whole of last season.

Not watching week in week out you may not have seen some of the dire play. But that's what people see week in and week out. If you think that is not important, well I'm sorry I disagree, the GF is a one off, and is not enough to keep a team afloat.

I'm kind of in agreement with that. I'm not sure you can say that Simmons has a proven ability of getting teams up for the business end of the season based on one season's worth of results when you could argue that Wire and Wigoon just run out of gas. The rest though are fairly valid. I suppose for me the concern is that if he isn't coaching the players well that we lose a season's worth of development for them. Placing Mike and KC in charge puts a lot of pressure on them (not necessarily a bad thing for them to see how hard a job it is) but at least it will get the team off the hook i.e. fans less likely to get on the team's back.

You're right in saying that it's a risk though because they could be rubbish and our defence could go further backwards. Is it a risk worth taking? Well we're going to find out.

I have a very good memory. You don't need to tell me what happened last season as I witnessed it with my own eyes. However, only an idiot would fail to see that Royce is absolutely clueless at the minute and we are possibly at our lowest point, in terms of form, since Super League began.

So what would you suggest? Keep faith with him because he is a nice bloke? Something had to happen and whether you like it or not, he is largely responsible for the way we play and solely responsible for team selection. Therefore, he had to go.

Can one of you more enlightened fans please explain this statement from McManus?

"Force of circumstance has reconstituted change."

Sorry but anyone attempting to justify a sacking with gobbledegook like that, simply shouldn't be in charge of hiring & firing a tea lady

Lets not forget there is the possibility that Royce had other issues, which would effect his performance from last year to this.

Some people are saying well he got us to a GF and had a similar start last year, well that kind of logic is what you should never use for any decision

just snipped this from any finance guide.

Past performance is not an indication of future performance.

He can hardly come out and say, KP and RS where not talking and had major disagreements on the running of the team. This has spilled over to the players and so neither Royce nor KP could continue given that they had major problems working together.

For me that kind of wording is the kind of wording that would be jumbled enough so that it did not leave the club open to anything.

Indeed. I'd bet substantial amounts of cash if I were a betting man that there's stuff behind the scenes we don't know about that is 90% of the reason behind the sacking. We'll find out when Wello's kiss-and-tell book comes out in a few years' time but probably not before sadly.

I doubt it, not unless Wello has enough evidence to stop a law suit for defamation.

You do persist in resorting to insults - implied or otherwise - which suggests to me that you are floundering, just offering up an ill-thought out emotional response.


Of course he is solely responsible for team selection but in case you hadn't noticed, we have limited depth thanks to the recruitment decisions of the board. We were defending just fine, with only Jamie Foster's howlers offering up tries, pretty much. That was an improvement on three weeks ago. So in fact we had improved. We were not being slaughtered. Far from it. We lost by a maximum of four points. We managed to perform at the outset and ending of each match, which suggests to me that our defeats have mostly been in the hands of the players, particularly the senior players.

Another way of seeing it (and, incidentally, the way I see it) is that the generally high calibre of player in our squad has just about kept us in games in which we have been floundering in terms of gameplan and structure.