Important to remember that whilst every now and then you get a Sculthorpe or a Harris come through who reach the first team and are immediately a class act, for the majority of players who have ever become an established super league player there is a period of say 1-3 years where they improve and gradually establish themselves. Included in this are some of the very best players such as Peacock. I think all of the players mentioned above have shown enough to suggest that if they continue to improve, they have the potential to be super league players for a long time to come, however there are lots of players who have been in he same position (i.e. very solid youngesters who have come in to the first team and looked fairly steady) and haven't quite managed to kick on to do this e.g. Blythe, McCarthey, Alstead, Sibbit, Gaskell etc

We have been a club that has brought through a lot of players from our own Academy for a long time. It's been a myth that we never gave our best Academy players a chance. When people criticise us for that what they mean is that unlike Wigan, Leeds, Saints and others, we have not really produced top quality players.

If you go back to the Cullen era there was Riley, Mark Gleeson, Hulse, Harrison, Pickersgill, Kevin Penny, Mitchell, Blythe plus Gaskell and Bracek signed from Saints academy. Back in DvDV day and there was Roper, Wood, Noone, Highton, Sibbit, Stenhouse, Campbell, Cowell, Alstead, Stevens, Duffy. Go back a few years before that and it was Harris, Sculthorpe, Lee Penny and Hilton.

We have been a club that has given young players a chance for a long while. I can't think of many players that were in our academy but left because they weren't getting enough opportunities and went on to be successful players in SL elsewhere.

I have to say though that since Harris and Scully there have only been four real good ones: Wood, Riley, Harrison and Cooper.

Yes, 2006 was probably our best year - Ben Harrison, Mike Cooper and Kevin Penny all made their debuts, with two going on to be regular first team players. Most of our youngsters have not been good enough and ended up like e.g. Andy Braceck, who currently plays for Fax, or Adam Neal who was with Salford last year. The big question though is why ? You can put forward [ipossible[/i reasons why we have failed to produce top quality players, but there doesn't seem to be a definitive answer.

Ben Currie is 20 and he doesn't look out of place in the pack, that in itself is something, a young lad playing against fully mature men, big men and more than holding his own physically, i remember him putting a massive shot on Crabtree when he was 18 years old.

He has a wingers pace, he has the ball handling skills of a back and he is still only [size20[/size.

No i won't make light of the fact there is some bias with me on the Currie issue but looking at it objectively and taking in the facts we need to realise that if he is still here in his late twenties when he fills out and his strength improves (a scary thought considering how strong is now as a boy) i think we'll have a special player.

Plus he had an illness preseaon in which he lost a lot of weight and muscle mass at a point in which he was really looking to kick on.

I believe that he's only fully recovered from that fairly recently.

I think it is harder for us because Warrington is not really a RL heartland in the way that some other clubs' towns are: I would bet that there is a greater density of local junior RL players in Wigan, Leeds, St Helens, Hull, the Wakefield/Cas part of West Yorkshire, than around Warrington.

So harder for us to get the raw talent.

In terms of what are we doing with the talent, I think we must be doing something right. The lads that are coming through these days look much better drilled than the lads that came through in the past were. They seem to know how to fit in a team, even if they don't stand out they don't have the 'sticking out like a sore thumb' thing that previous youngsters did.

There's another point there actually about us looking for individual performance. These days under Tony Smith we are a much better coached team. The team is better than the sum of its parts, especially this season, because I can't think of that many even of the senior players who have had excellent seasons. The Monaghans, Bridge, Hill, Ratchford in parts....not a lot else really.

So if we say the junior players have been just OK and a lot of the senior players have been just OK, someone must be doing something right because we have been up near the top and a few weeks ago were talking about going on our all time top SL winning run!

So maybe what is happening is these lads are being given jobs to do in the team, they are drilled and focused and they are just doing those jobs. TS knows their abilities and limitations at this stage and is just asking them to do that. If that is the case then they've got a good environment to develop as RL players in a team, even if they don't stand out as superstars.