Quote: Douglas Black "There's a lack of logic here. Not enough academy players and crap recruitment but we have a squad good enough to win trophies. Where are these players materialising from? Or does the coach get more out of them than we should expect?'"
Well, the academy and external recruitment are essentially both the same thing, a source of new / better talent. Clearly the academy production line has not been providing the number of squad players that we need, hence we have had to rely on external recruitment.
If you have a high quality coach then you can mitigate the lack of quality of the squad simply because he uses better tactics on the day, gets more from individual players, switches players to better positions, generates better team spirit etc etc. A good example of that would be Salford over the last two seasons where they even managed to get to a GF. I think most people would agree that SP is not in that category, indeed Salford have beaten us in all four games over the last two seasons.
In order to be successful we need a good quality squad and coach in combination. As LTS pointed out, we do have quality players in the squad but we have failed to recruit two decent bench props and brought in two poor replacements in Latu and Akauola. We also recruited Burrell, and whilst he would not have gone on the cap., he will still have been expensive. Similarly Blake Austin and Tyrone Roberts before him have been average,......but expensive. Our track record has simply not been good enough in recruitment. So that disadvantage combined with a pretty ordinary coach (who I suspect will also be very expensive) is probably the reason we have failed to challenge at the top table. We are cash rich but have made some poor decisions (JIMO)