But I am agreeing with you Bobby, I can see now that you are absolutely right. We would be champions, every year in fact. It would be like Groundhog Day but with a cup at the end every time. Every small boys dream surely ?

25 consecutive wins at Wembley would be nice, but wouldn't make us champions, so can we have at least one win at Old Trafford during that period too?

Thanks in advance.

I suppose we could fit that in. Sally reckons it will mean we will have to play 10 or 12 games a week towards the end of the season like his beloved Wigan did, but hey, I am a new man, lets go for it.

Why do you have this attitude that you can only get sustained success through cheating?

What about sign the best players with a winning mentality and create a culture of ongoing success like Wigan did in rugby league or like Man United did under Ferguson. Also look at what Gary Hetherington has done at Leeds with guys who are winners like Sinfield, Burrow, McGuire and co, they aren't satisfied with resting on their laurels they want to fill Leeds trophy cabinet winning SL year after year. All these teams got their success legally.

Do you accept the Kangaroos as a great team or do you think their sustained success in international RL is down to being on drugs?

Simon Moran and Tony Smith have shown what can be done if you have the financial investment to target the top players, then have the right coaching set up that creates a successful culture. We have won 3 Challenge Cups, made a Grand Final and won a minor premiership without busting the salary cap or failing drugs tests.

So from this great start would you not want us to go onwards and be the number one force in our sport or is ambition only allowed at clubs like Wigan and Man United?

obviously the salary cap prevents anyone doing what wigan did...

sure we can compete at the top end of the market and get some of the best signings.... but we cant have all of them.

I don't have an attitude that says you can only have sustained success through cheating. Liverpool had a long successful period which was down to the culture, desire, coaching, attention to detail etc etc. Berisford is doing the same with cycling. If Wire can win everything for the next 10 years within the rules and spirit of the game, I will be delighted.

Ambition is essential. Armstrong had it coming out of his ears. But if you attempt to give yourself an unfair advantage (and I know that can be difficult to define), then you destroy the point of competing in the first place. It is hardly surprising that as Deckchair pointed out, we have moved to a salary cap.

Liverpool just bought all the best players like Wigan did.

When I started watching football they went out and signed McMahon, Barnes, Beardsley, Houghton and Rush. Before that they had been signing guys like Dalglish, Keegan and Souness. Players that dominated their era.

Whats the difference between doing that, and Wigan signing Hanley, Bell, Offiah and co?

Wigan had more home grown players in the core of their dominant team than Liverpool did. Man United did as well.

So was Liverpool's success not through the unfair advantage of just signing up the top players?

Passing the ball back to the keeper as well?

I don't have the facts to back this up completely as Liverpool aren't my team but IMO they didn't sign the top players, they signed good players and fitted them into their successful system, and sometimes these good players became great, Keegan, Rush and Dalgliesh particularly. That's why they dominated a system of replacing and refreshing the squad. United did it with Robson, Ince, and Keane to pick on one particular position that kept the results coming by keeping the system going.

Liverpool didn't operate like a modern day Real Madrid outbidding and buying up all the available top talent whether they needed it, or were taking a gamble on it, or sometimes cynically making sure that no one else could have it.

A squad of Galacitico's works two ways, you have the best talent and your rivals by definition can't, whether that translates into having the best team or not is of course another matter

Well ok, perhaps my argument isn't perfect, but you know what I mean.

On the argument of buying players in as the basis of their success, I would have thought that Shankley was the most important factor rather than buying power.

The players Liverpool signed were signing for a club which already had the infrastructure in place. It's no good signing all the best players if the club isn't run properly.

Look at Real Madrid when Beckham and the other galaticos were there, weren't they unsuccessful in winning trophies.

Correct... the first liverpool manager to buck this trend was Dalglish.. he brought in the likes of Beardsley and Barnes, who were the best players in the league at the time... This worked for a while, but did untold damage long term.

Liverpools long successful era certainty wasn't built on buying the 'best' players around.

Signing the likes of Beardsley and Barnes didn't do untold damage long term.

What did untold damage was when they stopped signing the best players, and as their ageing greats left they were replaced by guys like Saunders, Walters, Thomas, Stewart, Ruddock and Nigel Clough. These were all players who were decent but not in the top tier, so Liverpool became a club that was decent but not top tier.

History would have been different if Liverpool had been in for guys like Gascoigne, Pallister, Ian Wright, Keane, Shearer etc.

I think there is an art in timing when it comes to signing the best players around. You have to spot who is about to become really good, and sign then them: Alex Ferguson is a master at this, and Wenger in his early years at Arsenal. Players who are already galacticos don't always have the same success when they move clubs. Chelsea got burned with Shevchenko and Torres and I wouldn't be surprised if the same happens with Rooney.

They are still expensive though because the price of a player is based on his future value over time (including resale value), so a young player showing a lot of promise will be expensive.

To bring this back to rugby, we did well with guys like Briers, Westwood and Bridge, getting them when they were just potential with question marks over how good they will be, and they turned out to be great investments.

Tony Smith has gone for guys like Atkins, Myler and Ratchford but we had to pay good money for Myler and Ratchford especially. Still they could turn out to be good investments over time.

It's like investing in any asset, only rarely will you get someone picking up an asset for nothing that nobody knows about (eg Dougie Laughton finding Offiah in lower division RU), on the whole the market has a fair bit of information about what is likely to be a good investment, but you need the means and the business sense to know when to strike out and take a risk.

Obviously if you produce assets like that in your own Academy its an advantage but even there risky decisions need to be taken to shift out experienced players and take a punt on the younger guy, Daryl Powell did a lot of path clearing before TS arrived at Leeds, and Ferguson did it at the end of the 94/95 season at United to open the door for his kids. But the kids have to be good enough. Wenger did it in the late 2000s with Arsenal but they dropped in standard and then everyone says you need to sign experience.