Quote Marshy1="Marshy1"With respect look at the two signings for next season, do you consider either to be Salford standard players? Then we turn to the kids I know for a fact that the policy is to look all over the place bar Salford for young players .... What message does that send to local kids who would possibly excel representing their club.
Incidentally, whilst I accept that the season before last you had an ageing team, you can hardly say that the likes of Puletua and Morely etc were youth signings.
You have just been turned over by a very very young Wigan team, a good number of which are coming from their youth system, so I disagree that the build up has to come from a successful first team.'"
I consider the two signings for next season to be absolutely the quality of signing the club needs. They each address the very specific problem of our devastating lack of pace. However, their signings have no bearing on the policy of looking anywhere bar Salford, because, frankly, there aren't too many young players out there, not compared to Wigan, Leeds and Hull anyway. And the reason for that is surely that neither of the city's two professional rugby teams have been attractive propositions in the past 30+ years. To get kids interested in the sport, you need to give them an attractive, successful team to support. Both Salford and Swinton have manifestly failed to do that. The only way to get us out of this situation is to buy a successful team and, hopefully, in years to come we'll be able to have a team full of Salfordians playing at the highest level.
As for the signing of old players, this, again, is manifestly untrue. Some weeks ago, I put a list up on the VT of all Brian Noble's signings together with their ages (I'll leave you to search for it). It was in response to someone who, like you, thought he'd signed a load of pensioners. The person in question didn't get back to me on that one, because, in truth, most of his signings were young. The problem is that too many of them - regardless of age - were no better than the players they were replacing. Elsewhere on this forum, someone posted a list of some of the players he released: Broughton, Godwin, Jewitt, Sneyd, Owen (albeit the last two on loan)... are the players we replaced them with better than these? I'd argue not. (By the way, I think Tony Puletua has been one of the more successful signings.) I think that's where the problem lies. With the signings made for 2015, I'm now more hopeful that we're heading in the right direction.
Changing coach mid season was not ideal, and was handled badly, but I'm not convinced Nobby was the right man for the job in the first place. Maybe the choice of replacement was knee-jerk, but the releasing of Nobby was, I fear, the right thing to do, Just at the wrong time.
He clearly has more money than sense, otherwise why pay well over the odds for a coach who has done nothing since the highly successful days at Bradford, and then get rid at the first sign of things not going to plan, and then in desperation turn to a coach who hardly set the rugby world alight at Crusaders.
