He's clearly not in Tony Smith's plans when it comes to our starting 17, is he? He's nothing more than a squad player who will fill in when or if needed. He's a step up from Laithwaite and Wheeler, so what's the big deal? Matty Blythe being a versatile squad option, on peanuts, is hardly going to dictate whether we win the Grand Final or not I wouldn't have thought.

Because when one coach goes out you have to get another coach in so the relative merits are important. And Powell would be very likely to be at or near the top of our list.

Ah I see, succession planning? We don't usually bother with that

Ha ha. Personally I would be preparing a short list of candidates for 2018 now and doing the ground work. So we have options. They could come in as director of rugby at any time.

Has to? We don't have the backs to win SL

For all this negativity, Smith has navigated a huge transition for the club. From the 2012 GF team, only Ratchford, Westwood and Hill were in the squad last year (plus Cooper this season), so if we're being realistic, he has reached major finals with two Warrington teams.

Looking at the Saints, Bradford and Leeds teams at the end of their golden generation, I think we've faired ok. The important thing to do is to back up last year with another trophy this season, and I'm confident we can do that. It's just a shame people don't really recognise the LLS as a trophy

The sky publicity machine has turned the GF into the must have victory.

publicity machine nothing, It IS the point of the season that we play.

Transition at Wigan seems to be a smooth way of life.
It's not even a talking point there.
They just keep churning them out and the biggest export for other clubs ate there surplus to requirements.

I know what you mean, and it's a little unfair that the best team over the course of the year isn't recognised more for their achievements.

However, all clubs know the way the system works and plan accordingly for the aim of winning the knockout competition at the end of the regular season. So even though Leeds winning from 5th seemed unfair to the team who finished top, it was known at the start of that season that the teams would have to peak for the playoffs and not necessarily benefit from winning the league.

But we haven't won a tap when it comes to grand finals
we are just the best of the rest....We haven't had a golden generation at all. ....We had Lee briers and Michael Monaghan....

We've half replaced monas with Clark and still haven't found a replacement for Briers and have never had a scrum half we've been happy with since Nat Wood.

It just feels like we are winging it from year to year because we've got money. .....

It's certainly true that we have consistently bought players, but TS also tried to win the GF with an old squad. In fact we used to get hassle from other posters about it on a regular basis. You only need to go back to 2012 / 2013 and see that we had Bret Hodgson, Chris Bridge (crocked), Lee Briers, Adrian Morley, Monas, Gareth Carvell (crocked), Micky Higham, Paul wood etc. None of them were spring chickens. We should have been recruiting some quality younger players at that point ( or before) rather than trying to squeeze the last drip from the grape pulp. Instead we had a very unbalanced squad with a lot of youngsters at the other end - Rhys Evans, Williams, GOB, Currie, Laithwaite, Dwyer. I think we were guilty of not planning for the future. Then of course the inevitable happened and we lost a lot of high quality players very quickly.

Time will tell whether or not TS can finally nail the GF, but for me his big drawback is longer term planning, and perhaps also being unrealistically optimistic about the quality of the players in his squad.

During that era Smith was recruiting younger players: Atkins, Myler, Ratchford and Hill were all early 20s when they joined.

However, we had a salary cap and so to do more recruitment of young players would have involved a trade-off of releasing some of those older players while they still had a couple of good seasons in them. If we had started moving on Morley, Briers, Carvell, Hodgson, Monaghan etc earlier in favour of other younger signings that weren't at their level yet, we would have had a dip in performance which might have meant we weren't as close to winning the Grand Final at the time. There's also a risk that those players would have been picked up for a season or two by the likes of Leeds, Saints, Wigan and won Grand Finals with them and then people would have said, is the goal about permanently "building for the future" or is it about going all out to try and actually deliver the Grand Final.

Although we didn't win, we gave ourselves the best shot by dragging every last bit of potential out of that team.

Also remember at the time there was no big call for us to be moving on those players and this talk about the team being left to get old with nobody waiting in the wings has just come about with hindsight. At the time the talk on these boards was "the future is bright" with exactly those names mentioned above: Evans, GO'B, Currie, Dwyer were seen as real stars in the making and you would get threads on here with a "future Wire team" full of those and comments about how bright the future looks.

The harsh truth is - our young players were not as good as Wigan's. If they were, then Shaun Wane wouldn't be being hailed for his Grand Final wins. People would have looked at his side and said how on earth did he let Wigan get to a situation where he was just throwing Academy lads in and expecting them to turn in to a winning side. Last year that Wigan team that he lined up against us in the Grand Final was basically no names that nobody would have heard of a year or so before. Why is Wane not being panned for that?

The difference is Wigan's lads were quality young players who could step up and win a Grand Final, whereas most of ours have not lived up to their early high rating.

Distinct possibility of bring this year's Leeds now. On current form can anybody see points from Wigan home Leigh and Saints away and Hull home so could easily be 0 from 7.

No way back from there

Where does the blame lie other than at Smiths door