Well, unless they have absolutely stellar 2020 seasons you can add BMM and Akuolau to the flop list.

Both have the physical attributes to be devastating but when it comes to effort, they sweat less than Prince Andrew in a den of ill repute. Apparently.

If you compare the 2020 team to the one of 2016 (LLS, beaten in 2 finals) we look stronger

2016

Ratchford (had the no 6 shirt but ended up at full back)
Lineham
R Evans
Atkins
Russel
Gidley
Sandow
Hill
Clark
Sims
Currie
Hughes
Westwood

Westerman
Dodds
Dwyer
Laithwaite

Dodds only featured twice due to injury and Laithwaite not at all, so should really include G King (who played 34 out of 36 games) Next highest appearances go to Penny (20), Jordan Cox (1icon_cool.gif and T King (16). There are gaps / weaknesses in the 2020 team, most notably the vacant no 16 shirt, but we should be competing for titles in 2020.

Quite a number of games for squad fillers.

Tasi - 18 games in 2019 season.
Cox - 27 games in 2016 season.
Brown - 12 games in 2018 season.

I'll give you

Thompson - 7 games in 2018.

In the peak TS era, we didn't have to make signings for those type of squad fillers. We used Academy players like Evans, Williams, GOB, Currie, Dwyer, Mitchell and McCarthy.

Injuries account for that, or are you suggesting they were signed as first choice players?

Going round in circles SC, one minute the argument is that our young players aren’t good enough but are given too many opportunities, the next it is your point above. 6 of one and half a dozen of the other. The stand ins, whether home grown or not have generally not been good enough.

That 2016 team finished top of the table and made two finals but it was almost identical to the 2017 team which finished in the bottom 4.

In 2016 we benefited from Sandow's golden spell and also Ben Currie at his best, until he got injured late in the season. Take those two out and the team was exposed in 2017.

No just challenging the term "squad filler" as that implies to me that they would not play much, if at all.

I think we can both agree that our signings in the last 4 seasons have seen the occasional pearl amongst a lot of dross which is what the thread has developed to discuss.

Yes this appears to be the case. Our "areas to improve upon" seem to be

1. Developing our own players good enough for the Top 4 squads. (We will know we have achieved a high standard when we cast off our unwanted players to Wigan and Saints, rather than Widnes and Leigh or the championship - note how many cast offs from Wigan we take.

2. Our ability to get performance value for money from our open market recruitment both domestic and international.


*Cast off is a bit strong, but you know when you release players because you have better.

If we could get the first then we could afford to take more time over the second. Oh for the days when our cast offs were the quality of Harris and Sculthorpe.

I wouldn't call them cast offs, and I don't want to go back to the days when once in a generation talent are sold off to keep the club afloat.

well said

This is a good point. I think there are 2 separate issues, the quality of our young players and the fact that every good squad needs some fringe players and there are certain characteristics you want in those players too.

Fringe players are never going to be elite talents, if they are they will sign somewhere else if they aren't regulars, but ideally you want them to be versatile so they can cover various positions, be consistent performers rather than boom / bust types, and be low-ego players who will knuckle down and not rock the boat if they aren't getting in a winning side. If they have come from your academy and stay around for a long time and give you consistency, great. If you have a revolving door of signings who are fringe players at other clubs, spend a bit of time with us before moving on somewhere else (as we have done since the later TS era), not so good.

On the issue of young players not being good enough / getting more chances than they would at other clubs I think the difference between us and the likes of Wigan is just the volume coming through. They always have young players pressing for places in their team, so when their Academy players break out in the first team, it's not long before they have the next generation underneath them pushing them hard for places. If someone from the next generation is better than them, they get pushed out and moved on to clubs like Warrington.

With us, where there is less talent coming through, players are more likely to break out in to the first team and then be able to survive a lengthy time of plateauing or going backwards than they would at Wigan because we haven't got enough talent from the next generation pressing them. Rhys Evans and Dec Patton would have felt pressure from below sooner if they'd been at Wigan.

Interesting point here. It's been a while since we lost players against our wishes to a club perceived to be bigger than us/offer better prospects.

Probably the last one was Mike Cooper going to St George-Illawarra, but the NRL is slightly different as even the top UK clubs can't resist NRL clubs.

Who was the last Warrington player who got poached upwards in the Super League food chain? Fozzard going to Saints in 2004, and Toa going to Hull in 2001, are the last ones I can think of?

The last home grown player we lost? Sculthorpe going to Saints in 98?

Didn’t realise I would have to use an emoji on that post!