I disagree. The young players comprised Foster, Gaskell, Lomax, Wheeler and Dixon. Wheeler and Dixon got off to a fabulous start; Wheeler was our best player on more than one occasion. Lomax was doing just fine. Foster and Gaskell were both looking shakey in three matches. They both needed a bit of time out because it was a second season for them after a GF appearance and so expectations of them were much higher than last year.

So far as I can remember, we had virtually a full team of senior players playing for most of the matches at the start of the season.

Stop the press

Ditto.

So you were happy to get knocked out in a semi final and fluke our way to another defeat at Old Trafford by an average team just because we had young english players ? That's ridiculous.

You keep banging on about young english players and in an ideal world we would have an all english champion team but in reality our youth system isn't producing star players so we have to buy quality players like Manu in to help us win silver. We have too many average players coming through our academy like Dixon, Gaskell, Ashurst and Foster and the quicker fans realise that we need to buy in because these kids are not good enough then the quicker they may start to accept buying oversea's players in is a must.

Best signing any team will make for next year IMO.

Apart from hull, I'd like to see Saints and Manu win a trophy as he really deserves to finish his career with a medal.

The whole idea of ramming a team full of ex-academy players is so naive, I can't believe people are still advocating it as a way of running a professional sports club as it's been proven time and again NOT TO WORK.

We were slipping dangerously into this mentality around 2009, when people were thinking the likes of Dean, Ashurst, Frodsham etc. were all going to make it and automatically slot in to replace the international standard players we were losing (Gilmour, Longy, Sculthorpe, Talau, etc.)

In reality, although these players can come in and do a solid enough job without letting anyone down, the vast majority of them aren't of the required quality to sustain a continued challenge at the top of Super League. Not only that, but throwing them all in at the same time is poisonous to their development, and the better players who do have a chance of being Saints/international class, the Lomax/Jones/Makinsons of this world need experienced, battle-hardened pros to play alongside.

It's all about squad balance so I'm pleased with the signing of Manu as he gives us something we don't have. If we lose Dixon, so be it. We're not very often wrong about the youngsters we let go and, although he's shown some promise, there's been nothing to suggest he'll ever be as effective a player as Manu is.

I agree and been saying same thing for long long time.

Only the most self-evidently clueless loony in the world could ever think that this would be a good idea.

The is one on here, believe me!

Actually, given the number of different accounts said individual uses, there are many

The Ideal situation would be to have one top class junior per year from the academy. 3 or 4 in a year never works ( unless your name is Alex Ferguson

).

I think you can do alot with kids actually and Wigan are a prime example of this. The question is one of quality, not youth, homegrown, imports, aging, etc.

The advantage of a youth player coming through would be that they are relatively cheaper over the long run and that in playing for their hometown side, you can engender some of that patriotic spirit that someone coming in would not naturally have which all other things being equal should provide some advantage.

But over all this comes quality, if the quality is not good enough you can be as cheap and spirit filled as you like you will not acheive what those with quality can. If we had a Willie Manu at Saints who we were throwing out in favour of a Willie Manu from Hull then there would be a good arguement that we are not doing well by the homegrown players, but we don't, so it's not an arguement.