Daryl Powell

Quote: Wires71 "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.'"

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"?