A fifty odd year old Phil Blake of today would probably shape up better than this bunch!!

No honours in the way you mean, but Sid Domic was in the Dream Team at Wakefield, which you'd think means he was outstanding considering how unfashionable Wakefield are as a club.
Eager made a couple of Semi Finals with Cas. It was a good era for them. I'm pretty sure Cas were above Warrington in all that period, so I'd say Eager did alright.

both eager and domic ended up at hull, weirdly.

Back on topic
I wouldnt have kept any of the seven. All good decisions.

You speakamalanguage, MPN
Sadly, at the time, it was really only big time Kiwis that would come over here, permanently (Tamati, West, Bell etc). Aussies just did September to February, and went back home.
To anyone on here under the age of 35, you really missed out on a absolute joy to watch. The only player currently comparable to Blake, would possibly be an in form Barba. He had a better kicking game than Diego Maradonna. His try v Widnes on his debut (LCCSF) was a thing of beauty. A packed Wilderspool, that night.

(iirc) there are a couple of YouTube clips of him.

Sorry fellas, there's something in my eye (sniff)

It's a sorry fact that despite the money brought in from the TV rights and SKY, and SL, we will never see talents like that (Blake/Davies/Hanley/Scofield/Offiah again in our sport.

Bob Jackson, Brian Johnson & Les Boyd. They all came over here at a similar time. They lasted a few years over here.

Tbf,
Was Jackson a regular down under, in 1983?

Johnson was at the fag-end of his career, and we squeezed 3 years out of him. He was never going to usurp Jack, Belcher, Eadie, et al, for the Aussie No 1 jersey.

And Boyd, well no Aus club would touch him with a pooey stick.
The Aussie transfer embargo ended in time for the 84-5 season, and not many came over here for more than the 5 month stint .

Johnson was only 28 when he came here.

This was the era before the NZ Warriors, so there was no elite level professional club option for the New Zealanders. Some played for Aussie clubs but the option of a career in the UK was more important to the Kiwis than the Aussies.

However, the flipside of those days when our season didn't run at the same time as the Aussies, was there was the option for elite Aussie players to do an off-season stint in the UK without affecting their Australian club career. So you had the top Kangaroos players like Sterling, Kenny, Meninga, Lewis coming over as well as guys like Blake. That would be the equivalent now of being able to sign Thurston, Cronk, Inglis, Slater for half the season over here....which would give our game a major profile boost.

The key point is both those players would have easily got in the Warrington team had we kept them, and would have been better than the players we replaced them with.

The one player who did get one over on us by winning honours was Martin Gleeson. Despite the fact that Gleeson had been a very good player for us, and was the signing that really kicked us off as a team to be taken seriously, he seemed to have become unpopular with our fan base by the end. I think it was because by the end of 2008 he seemed to be seriously peed off with playing in an underperforming team that was not going to win trophies and he looked like he was sulking, although in terms of performances he was still playing quite consistently well for us. He then went to the 2009 World Cup and was one of England's best players and looked sharp and motivated when he was playing for England, more than he did for us. One of TS first decisions was to move Gleeson on to Wigan and sign Mathers in return, I remember that being a popular decision amongst our fans, proof that TS "didn't care about reputations". Gleeson then went on to win Super League with Wigan although his career did tail off alarmingly after that point. I think we got rid of Gleeson about 18 months too soon.