Quote Dita's Slot Meter="Dita's Slot Meter"The point is, from the outside, during the Moran era, we have always looked like a club that prefers a high profile signing, rather than one that wants to invest as significantly in its academy and the production of more lower profile individuals.'"
So when do you define the start of the 'Moran era'?
Do you mean when he first became a director in 1998 or when he took ownership in 2004?
Before he became a director in 1998 we were the club that was selling off our Academy products Harris, Sculthorpe), and chasing signings like Andy Currier, Martin Dermott, Mike Ford, Richie Eyers, Paul Hulme. I'm not sure this was a particularly long-term mentality.
In the years between 1998 and 2004, we were a club who went for ageing internationals: Allan Hunte, Allan Langer, Andrew Gee, Tawera Nikau, Kevin Walters and ageing not-internationals Steve Georgallis, Paul Marquet, Matt Rodwell.
After Simon Moran took ownership, the recruitment policy stepped up a notch. Instead of it being just players winding down their careers wanted we started targeting top players who were still in their prime: Gleeson, Morley, Hodgson, King, the Monaghans, and also started signing young talent from other clubs' academies: Bridge, Grix, Harrison. I don't remember anybody ever saying that these guys were not putting the effort in because they had come from other clubs academies rather than our own.
Also in the Cullen and later TS era there were a lot of young home grown players given their chance. In my view, some of them got a lot more chances with us than they would have done, had they been at one of the top clubs, and you can use the lefty critique about us being too nice, with the number of first team games that guys like Evans and Patton got with us.
If you compare our record at winning trophies and making finals in the years since Simon Moran has been owner it is on a different scale to what it has been before.
So I don't think its fair to say that this is a problem that is related to Simon Moran's involvement.
For me the two relevant problems here are:
a) We lag behind the top clubs in producing [ireal talent[/i in the Academy. We've churned out a lot of so-so SL standard players and been willing to give them chances, but only Wood, Cooper, Currie and Riley really worthy of being in a title-challenging team.
b) The recruitment of outside players improved from 2004 to 2013 but has gone backwards since. Recruitment has become harder for all clubs as the market from the NRL has tightened and there's real scarcity of props and halfbacks but some other clubs (Wigan, Cas, Salford) have been notably better than us at finding underrated gems. Wigan in particular signed a number of players that we scoffed at like Blake Green, Matty Smith, but then went on to win Grand Finals. The quality of recruitment also seemed to decline after Andy Gatcliffe left.
