Lets think positive Wires71 we wouldn't want the Smith loyalists to be back on here saying "I told you so" would we.

I've jumped in with both feet already this month and regretted it, so I'm holding off here.

Not sure what you mean by this one?

Following the Wires71 test, Holbrook has failed and Saints will show they are willing to accept mediocrity if they don't sack him and get someone new in the off-season.

Been said earlier, catch up.

Give over. Maybe if he has 8 seasons and still comes up short. Not that Saints would allow that length of time to elapse due to inherent winning culture.

I am sometimes staggered at peoples inability to follow a simple, cogent, argument at times. Please tell me you can tell the difference between 8 years and 6 months.

Just part of the general abuse of Smith now that he has gone. The re writing of history on here could put the former Eastern Bloc to shame.

Where is the re-writing?
Most people are making factual comments. It would be hard to disagree that the squad has been left in a mess and we had a woeful season.

Perhaps people need counselling to accept that fact he's gone and not only that he wanted to go!

^^^THIS^^^

Of course I'm not claiming Holbrook as their messiah. I'm saying he took a bottom four team to the top four in half a season and transformed the way they play. They are invigorated and will almost certainly compete next year at the top. You could even argue that he's done more with them performance-wise than Smith did with us in his first season (despite the cup win). That's not a dig at Smith just a point I'm using.

Holbrook didn't fail to win anything after 5 years of decline, and for those using the argument of 'Saints only did well because of the league structure' well you could say the same about us last year. We were not the best team before the split (Hull were top) and the league was even less competitive last year than it is this year. And our cup run came after easy games against lower opposition, as opposed to Hull who did it the hard way.

I'm not a Smith hater, but I rue the decision to not follow Saints example when it was clear we had bottomed out after the first half of the season and would not recover....

People don't like hearing perceived negativity even if it's the reality. Same in all walks of life. People will avoid it like the plague.

Someone posted yesterday that perhaps Moran is guilty of being too loyal and too friend-like to our head coaches. I think that's accurate and could well be a blind weakness of his. I just hope he's learned from his mistakes next time around.

We need to be ruthless as a club in our quest for success. If the top down culture isn't "only the best will do", then we'll never change our mentality.

Smith has gone now, had he gone mid season we may or may not have been in a better position. We will never know. You can not simply extrapolate what happened at Saints and conclude that the same would've happened to us even if Holbrook was our coach. I now await a cogent counter view.

Of course not. I guess I didn't put my point across correctly:

Had we acted earlier I believe we may have been in a better position to recruit a new coach and rebuild the squad for 2018.

We didn't act. We look to be struggling to get the coach we want. We have lost players. We have not recruited players. We don't even know which players our new coach will want. I believe the failure to act at the time has cost us at least one whole season (2018).

The best we can hope for is a reintroduction of licensing at the end of next season so our future is assured.

All fair points, but again its guesswork. We don't KNOW what's happening with player recruitment, just because there are no announcements doesn't mean they aren't sorted. Had Smith gone mid season who knows who the new coach would've been. I don't think it was unreasonable to believe that there may be more coaches willing to move at the end of the season than the middle, but that is also a guess.