Lee Briers played in benefit match for Liverpool St Helens RUFC this year with Martin Gleeson, Long, Wellens, and some international players from RU. Lee outshone the rest by far. I don't think he's the type to rest on his laurels.

It's a bit harsh to describe winning the Challenge Cup as 'treading water'. It's a big achievement to win a Challenge Cup, even if the team has done it before. We went 35 years without winning one.

However I do agree with your general point. For me the statistic that illustrates it is doing a before-and-after comparison over an equivalent time period. Since Steve Price has been coach we've played 62 SL games (including playoffs/GF). If you compare those to the last 62 games under Tony Smith you get:

Price P 62 W 35 D 1 L 26 F 1510 A 1133
Smith P 62 W 38 D 3 L 21 F 1590 A 1258

The points against column looks better. You also have to take in to account the fact that 4 of those games under TS came in the 'qualifiers' against Championship teams.

However the improvement overall over that time period has been pretty small. Considering that this comparison period was the time when it was generally felt that the TS era had gone stale and we were in need of a change, it is disappointing.

It doesn't feel like we have moved forwards. I haven't gone through the St Helens record but I bet you would see a much starker contrast between the before and after periods for when Justin Holbrook took over.

If we had kept TS would anyone have been really surprised if we'd recorded the results that we got over the past two years...made a couple of finals and lost them, then got a win again at Wembley but bombed out of the playoffs. The discussion on here would have been yes TS has won Challenge Cups but he's not the man to take us to the next level and win the Grand Final, recruitment has been poor, the rugby is boring. Basically we are still having that discussion but we have changed the name TS for Steve Price.

Yes that is absolutely the question.

It involves various factors - who is available and who wants to come. Remember after TS we were linked with Michael McGuire, Des Hasler, Garth Brennan, Geoff Toovey, Dean Pay but one by one they all disappeared from the running. It may be that realistically we are not a club who is going to land an established, proven NRL coach but would be a club that an Aussie assistant would see as a good opportunity to prove themselves and build their CV before applying for jobs back home, following the well worn path of Michael McGuire, Trent Robinson and Holbrook.

But taking a shot on one of those involves risk as they are unproven and there have been a lot of Aussie assistants that came to the UK and were just average.

There's also the factor of a new coach having a new style of play, so needing time and salary cap space to bring in their own players, whereas Price has at least been building something in his own image in the last couple of years.

So it is not a slam dunk that we would be better off by making a change in this point, just like we haven't improved much since making the TS change. Tim Sheens was on the 5 live rugby league show last summer and talked about the 3 year cycle for a coach - usually first year he gets patience unless things are really bad, second year people start to expect more, and if the jury is still out on him by the start of the third year he better start well else he will be gone. That's where I think Price is, the first half of next season will be key. If we have form similar to the second half of this season and are running 7th/8th by mid season I think he will go. The tricky one will be what happens if we just basically repeat this season but without the Challenge Cup, make the playoffs but don't make an impact there. If I was CEO I'd be scouting out who would be available to take over in 2021 so if we are in that situation we can hopefully have someone good lined up, rather than just rolling the dice by sacking and seeing who is available at the time.

To put things in perspective though, if that happens and we did sack Price at the end of next year, he would still be the second most successful coach we'd had since the 1970s.