No point in spending a lot of time, energy and money on developing youth if we keep buying in proven players that gives youth little chance of coming in and proving their ability.

You also need to be able to let them fail as bigger lessons are learnt through fixing up failures than if you win every week. When bringing youth through you have to have patience and give them time so that we can reap the rewards.

Unfortunately fans EXPECT to win every week which means the kids are under pressure to perform from day 1 without being offered a bit of understanding that they may make mistakes initially but they will work damn hard to fix them up.

Made up with the youngsters this year, they really have stepped up to the plate and proven they are SL standard.

The average ages of Saints and Leeds for the round were around a year higher.

And Wigan.... As you are doing the sums..

Nne thing about SL being currently poor by comparison, is that we are having to produce our own, and they are getting more opportunities. But whether it affects the overall quality of the league, is another question, and one that should interest us all.

I think these days clubs are producing quite a good number of well developed professional players that prepare themselves well and are physically not outclassed by senior pros.

What is missing at the moment is star quality in the backs and halves. There have only ever been a handful of those players at any one time but there don't seem to be many coming through these days, apart from Tomkins and Eastmond a few years before that.

You can't deny the quality of guys like Sam Burgess and James Graham, up there with any of the games best forwards, but the question is where are the guys like Offiah, Davies, Schofield, Edwards, Andy Gregory, John Woods?

In 2012 a poster from another club, did the same average age maths with our then squad. The point they were making was that we had a squad of old codgers and within 2 years the squad would be broken up and we would be back to the Wire of old.

They were right about our then squad being broke up.

I cant find the post but I think at that time our average age came out around 29.