Quote Slippery Steve="Slippery Steve"Both Warrington and St Helens have very successful youth polices, however I think it is highly more likely that a youngster will get his chance at St Helens easier than at Warrington.'"
I wouldn't have said that was the case in recent years. I can think of a lot of lads who got their chance at Warrington - Mark Gleeson, Gary Hulse, Dave Alstead, Jamie Stenhouse, Dean Gaskell, Steve Pickersgill, Andy Bracek, these lads had a lot of first team games between them that they wouldn't have got at Saints. The honest answer is those lads were not good enough to have got the amount of games they got in SL, if they had been at Saints. The only one we brought through who I think would have been a long term first teamer at Saints, is Paul Wood.
If youngsters got their chance more easily at St Helens than at Warrington then Lee Briers wouldn't have joined Warrington.
The difference between us and Saints was not that Warrington aren't willing to give young players a chance, the Cullen era especially was good for that, Cullen brought a lot of lads through to the first team and gave them their chances, Harrison, Riley and Cooper have gone on to make it, others fell away. The real difference between us and Saints was that they have had top quality players come through their Academy and we haven't (Roby, Graham, Eastmond...and going back further, Wellens, Cunningham). Last time we produced anybody in that category was in the mid 90s with Harris and Scully.