Thats a fair point we did lose four players that were likely to be large earners this year and only brought one in. However that space could have been eaten up by existing players getting contract upgrades: we do have a few that signed new longish term contracts so this might have been on better terms.

I heard Tony Smith once on the radio before the season kicked off say that there was room in our cap for a signing.

Out; Briers, Morley, Hodgson, Carvell, Cooper, Blythe, Tyke

We know Carvell was on £135k/yr, so those first four were probably about £600k of cap

In;
Asotasi, Russel, England, Penny

Penny was peanuts (15,k) and the other two were not established SL standard, so probably less than Cooper and Blythe.


So excluding salary upgrades, there was probably a fall of around £450-500K in our salary cap last year.

out. you forgot solamona

£385 under this year!

.000

Pre season I spoke with Brian Carney about this...he reckons were 400k under cap.

There are some considered and thoughtful opinions being expressed, eventually, and it's interesting to see how varied they are.

There's no way we as fans can say with certainty what should and shouldn't have happened with regards to recruitment because we aren't in possession of the full facts. I'm surprised and disappointed by some of the ins and outs, but I fully expect there are valid reasons for each one that we don't know about.

All this talk about replacements is well and good but we are only eight games into the season and there's an awful long way to go. The focus should be how to get the best out of the current squad.

And that's my main concern!

Two of the main accusations from fans are a lack of pace and poor cohesion in attack.
So to see recent comments that training sessions don't really focus on these aspects got me wondering.
What do they do?
As a fan I'd be really interested to see a timetable of the average training week.
It can't all be weights, aerobic and wrestling (and Twitter and Nando's) can it?
If anyone reads this with first hand knowledge would be kind enough to offer a glimpse of a typical schedule I for one would be very grateful.

By the way, this isn't questioning the efforts and commitment of the coaching staff and players, I'd genuinely like to know what they are doing instead of speed work and formulating attacking structures. (There's nothing wrong with attacking structure, ask any Wigan fan!)

I thought it would be nice to finish on a positive or two.
In 2009 we were next to bottom after Round 9 with only two wins. So things can turn around quickly; form is a fickle commodity. After all, we finished that season at the heady heights of tenth place(!) - but with the Challenge Cup in our possession.
Also, Myler and Ratchford were our starting half backs in 11 league games last year and won 8 of them scoring an average of 30 points per game.

I might be wrong, but I'm still fairly confident that this season will end up OK.

Having witnessed a Captain's run at the H&J, I can confirm we do practice attacking plays.

Without wanting to be too much of a knob, what could we have done around recruitment to make this better? We've had Myler and Ratchford here for a few years looking like strong players, we had O'Brien out on loan progressing and we had Briers here, looking like an evergreen. Injury forced Briers to retire after the season (could Smith have planned for that?), I imagine most halfbacks available were already signed (Walsh) and we surely couldn't have kept another halfback on the books during previous years as I imagine we were right at the cap.

I believe Smith's biggest mistake has been how fast everything happened. Morley, Carvs, Cooper and Hodgson, all in one Winter, whilst Briers also retired. If he felt the likes of BEvans, Laithwaite and Riley were ready to replace them, they should have been proving it by playing regularly for us last year, rather than spending time out on loan and coming to the club almost as new players.

I've 100% belief that Smith can rectify the situation. I think the majority of his signings have been good and made with the right intent. Ratch was clearly meant to play full back this year behind Briers and Myler, which would have worked, with him slipping in at 6 when Lee was resting, with Russell coming in.

As most have said, we might as well forget this season. We're just not equipped to compete.

I've said it before and I'll reiterate - the loss of Briers was unexpected, but we could have recruited overseas in plenty of time. The club is not short of contacts down-under, and to be honest there are half-backs playing reserve grade in Australia who would show our half-backs a thing or two.

The problem was either over-confidence, or over-estimating certain players abilities or ability to take on responsibility. As for the loss of experience, it would appear that both Carvell & Hodgson were virtually shown the door by the club - if we'd been concerned about losing so much experience in so short a time, we could have done something about it and re-negotiated with them.

As for this season, yes it appears to be a write-off, but lets not insult the intelligence of the paying punter by telling them that what is being served up the by team at the moment is part of some grand plan, that we are progressing and not far away.

Stand up and take a bow that man.
I applaud you.

I think for me, what somebody should have done was a 'risk assessment'. Looking back to last year we had Briers (35), Morley (36), Hodgson (35), Monas (33), and Waterhouse, Westwood and Carvell all 32 yrs of age. Its all right to have hindsight, but someone should have said that having 6 key members of the team between 32 and 36 was a big risk because we had no idea how quickly their performance would deteriorate or if injury would curtail their career. The danger was losing half the team very quickly - too quickly to replace them with equivalent quality and so maintain our top 4 position. So we should probably have been looking for high quality replacements back in 2012, and when an opportunity arose, bought in - regardless of which player we replaced. After all, we did keep extending the contracts of most of the above players, so the opportunity was probably there.