Ah Sal, your insights have been one of the things I’ve missed the most during my sabbatical away from RLFANS. Superb post as always.

It’s called having a bit of light hearted humour on a Tuesday afternoon.

FWIW I rate Powell. I think it’s a good appointment and I’m looking forward to seeing what he can do with a better squad and resources.

If he brings Trueman with him I’ll be elated.

Perhaps we also need some refreshment to our scouting set up to provide the calibre of player that Powell can improve & get the best out of instead of signing our usual overrated journeymen.

Now official.

Be interesting to see if he brings his own team in, or we go again with Henderson, Briers et al

Is this really (I mean, really) not going to happen until next year? It's going to be very strange for both coaches, but particularly Powell as the season progresses and both teams go through ups and downs.

IMO he will bring in his own team... which I think is good for the club. Briers is quite rightly a Wire legend... but he needs to move on. (Maybe coming back in 5 - 10 years as a head coach).

If nothing else he should get us playing in a way where you won't feel conned out of your hard-earned.

Actually he'd get more credit from me for keeping much of the same set up IF he judges it to be up to standard and he delivers.

I don't think any of us know what role/scope/influence Hendo and Briers have with SP.
Similarly for the rest of the back room staff.

I've no problem if he brings one or two new faces in in the backroom if he judges they wil add value.

Hendo did well at London before coming here and I think he'd be disappointed at not having been given a shot as head coach. Possibly that was the original intention when he joined but even though we've won trophy under SP I think we've gone backwards since the last year of TS.
Therefore with all the investment that's gone in I can understand why they wanted a proven pair of hands.

Hendo could end up as head coach of Cas! Who knows.

For me Briers needs to eventually go elsewhere to prove himself (similar to Cull) if he wants to be head coach.

I'm a lot happier than I was before the Powell appointment was announced.

I think we need to allow Powell to decide on his backroom really, hopefully he will want to work with Briers and Henderson but he needs to be backed to be successful and that includes the backroom staff IMO.

Henderson may well want to move on to become a head coach elsewhere, Anderson could possibly be promoted to first team as well. I certainly don't hold any of the current coaching staff outside of Steve Price accountable for our poor performances and I wouldn't be heralding them as the reasons we win trophies if we pick up silverwear, the buck stops with the head man.

I can assure you this hasn’t been the case at Cas since 2017.
For the last few seasons our style has been pretty basic and pretty easy to nullify. In 2017 we had naturally attack-minded players in Hardaker, Gale, Benny Roberts and McShane. Even our props could offer a ball-handling threat.
In 2018, 2019 and 2020 we were pretty predictable and easy to defend. Shut down our left-edge and we offered very little. This year looks a bit more positive with Evalds at full-back, but we’re still not offering much attacking threat.

Ouch. Hit us when we’re down.

Sounds very familiar