Sadly it seems like things are panning out as I suspected. We've gone into the year with a good coach but a substandard roster especially up front, which most of us knew deep down all off season. I know a few on here were trying to put a brave face on it, asking "which teams have better squads than us?" (well we know 2 already).

Things will get worse and the likelihood is this season we will be worse at least in terms of win/loss ratio than we had been under Price which will be hard to take. I expect Powell will get some flak on here but the problem is poor recruitment rather than him being a bad coach.

This season will also make clear the limitations of some of our players who have been overrated by our fanbase for a couple of years now, who thought it was all down to Price and thought our roster was so good any other coach would have been winning trophies with it. In time we might look back at the Price era and say winning a Challenge Cup and making 2 Grand Finals was a decent return given the players he had.

I'm happy we moved on from Price and happy we got Powell but think this season is a write-off.

Well said sir, they've had the easiest 5 games of anyone in the league.

How do you think this "poor recruitment" comes about ?


Is it ...

1. We see truly good players but cannot get them ie) that we cannot persuade the top players without offering a marquee wage

2. We see good players but our squad is so poorly balanced cap value wise we cannot afford them

3. We cannot see good players

4. We think average players are good players.

5. We recruit good players but they don't deliver their previous form consistently.

6. We think our current players are good and no need to replace them.

I think it's a case of 1, 2, 5. Top players will naturally want to go to historically top sides so they can win something. ie) If Saints and us are in for a player it is likely they will chose Saints unless we make an offer they cannot refuse which causes 2.

Quite a high number of games played though for "squad fillers". In bold the players who made more than 1/2 seasons worth of appearances.

Matthew Russell 96
Roy Asotasi 59
Sitaleki Akauola 44
Anthony England 37
Lama Tasi 18
Jordan Cox (RIP) 18
Dom Crosby 17
Ryan Bailey 15
Ben Pomeroy 12
Gary Wheeler 10
Luther Burrell 7
Matty Smith 5
Leilani Latu 3
Matty Blythe 3

Perhaps some of these imports just see us a a lucrative contract for minimal effort ,in other words money for old rope.

All of those would seem valid but there has been a definite change in the post Gatcliffe era.

in the mid 2000s to early 2010s our recruitment involved:

a) Genuine superstars who any club in the world would have liked to attract, and who lived up to their big expectations (Gleeson, Morley, Monaghan, King, Hodgson)
b) Players with a reputation of good rather than superstar but whose performance was right up with the superstars (Hicks, Carvell, Louis Anderson, Higham)
c) Young players with promise who turned out to be far better than we expected (Westwood, Bridge, Grix, Harrison, Hill....going back further you could include Briers although he was an outlier in an era of generally crap recruitment!)
d) Some misses: players who had a big reputation and or had won stuff at other clubs, who didn't deliver what we expected (Swann, Rauhihi, Reardon, Cardiss, Vinnie Anderson).

As we transition from the late Cullen era into the early TS era you see category d drop off and more signings in a and b.

But in the later TS era (post Gatcliffe) we had a reversal of that trend. We're not signing the a/b/c's any more, we're signing a lot of d's.

This suggests to me that we're not identifying the right players, we're going for names that seem like they have done well elsewhere and hoping they translate/improve with us. But how many of them actually do? How many of the players we have signed in recent years do you say "well he improved at Warrington compared to what he was with his previous club"?

We're five games in. Powell has improved every club he's been at with little resources. We haven't lost all five, but we've stuttered to 3/5 and we're in the top half of the table. How did our previous two coaches do in their first five games?

No doubt we don't have a squad with as much quality as the one TS inherited, but then no club does in 2022. And the players simply aren't available out there. We have to make do with the best that we can sign, and start producing adequate numbers of our own academy players. We are well on our way to doing the latter, and I seriously can't remember a time when we had so many homegrown players who seem to slot straight into the first team. It was stated Powell was brought in for this reason, because we know we can't just go out and sign NRL superstars anymore (not that it really worked anyway) and Powell has a record of turning good young players into great ones.

Of course, I'm not happy with performances so far (especially up front), but I'm prepared to give it more than five games. And I don't think the cup is a write off at all, even if the big one seems unrealistic this year. Also, it was only a couple of weeks ago 2nd-placed Wigan seemed a class above. They've just scraped past Toulouse and been thrashed by Cats.

I would say after the first 4 definitely squad fillers. England actually did alright and we have had a lot worse than Russell

Agreed mate, but you’ve missed 2 of the very worst out there…..Inglis and Tyrone Roberts. Truly terrible.

I'll throw this one out here again to the roberts haters, who took us to a challenge up and grand final in 2018?

Cos both ratchford and kevin brown were both called rotten and not good enough as well. so [isomeone[/i must have done something...

And let's not forget the perma-injured Mitchell Dodds & the failed experiment of Luther Burrell.

I left off Dodds as the broken leg was very unfortunate and we couldn't foresee that. Burrell is on the list though.

What I believe to be successful signings since 2014 (signings that had a significant positive impact on the teams' performance)

2014 - none
2015 - Daryl Clark
2016 - Gidley, Lineham, Westerman
2017 - Cooper, Hiku, (Brown?)
2018 - Charnley, Murdoch-Masilla, Goodwyn
2019 - Austin, Walker, Mamo
2020 - Ashton, Widdop
2021 - Williams