Born 1997, signed 2007 so I think 29 or 30 and he played 7 seasons for us.

Well he didn't seem too bad so perhaps we should make an exception. Better still look rather more carefully at who we are buying. Use the old grey matter, avoid journeymen, talk to players and coaches that know them well, look at their playing records and stats, ask them why they are happy to sign etc etc. Im not saying that putting on a blindfold and sticking a pin in a list of available players is not totally useless, but we do perhaps need to move on.

Did well for a 10 year old.

Players like Morley or Sonny Bill Williams are few, and no question would you make an exception for fitness professionals like those guys.
Even so, we still got Morley going on 29, which is close enough to a 27/28 age guide.

By and large a 27/28 year signing is going to give you 3+ years of worthy investment, so when they reach 31/32 you’d be thinking about the worth of an extension or not.

We don’t want to be signing the likes of Kasiano and Dudson again.

Hull made an approach, but it's been knocked back.

i think we should sign more 10 year olds

dammit

Especially as props don't usually reach their peak until about 11.

Ha ha sorry 1977!

Focus certainly seems to be on youth - it’s a nice refreshing change. https://www.warringtonguardian.co.uk/sp ... tor-rugby/

Focus certainly seems to be on youth - it’s a nice refreshing change. https://www.warringtonguardian.co.uk/sp ... tor-rugby/

From 2012 to 2022 we have had only Currie. Philbin, King, Thewliss and Wrench through the academy system that seem to have embedded themselves in the 1st team squad. That's really poor, and I know that we seem to have finally understood just how important home grown players are to our future success. But.... even allowing for the focus on player development and apparent success, I really hope we are going to see a balanced approach to the external and internal channels of squad recruitment. That may seem strange coming from me as I have been banging on about youth development for years, but I really hope this doesn't swing in the other direction and we end up shooting ourselves in the foot.

Hopefully it means agents will use other teams as stalking horses when trying to get their NRL players better terms.

That would certainly be a positive, we need to spend our cash wisely. Who knows when our benefactors may fade away and the cash pot disappears.

There has been a lot of talk inside the club on how the player market is lacking in quality and highly inflated. Over the past couple of weeks the Agents of 2 average English players have offered them to Warrington requesting laughable wages, which were immediately rejected. So I can see why the club have used the Guardian to dampen any fan expectation of big name signings with the spare salary cap we have, and to send a clear message to prospective players and there Agents.

The good news is Matty Nicholson has again turned down the chance of a 'big money' move to the Dolphins and will be staying on an improved contract. Spare salary cap spent very wisely imo.

Excellent news about Nicholson, I was resigned to losing him to the NRL when his current contract expired.

With the massive difference between the Salary Caps of the NRL and Super League, it is inevitable that we will lose some of our young talent to them in the future though.

We will just have to keep growing our own and competing for the youth talent in the UK.

Wish we had gome along this route a few years ago.