And that folks....was our Transitional season.

Quote: morrisseyisawire "In the early days of the campaign, when we floundering somewhat, I suggested that the club hadn't managed the transition from being a team reliant on it's older players to one reliant on younger players too well. My view was that the club had been caught with it's pants down a little and been forced to blood too many, too young, too soon.

Was I wrong? The development of B.Evans, R.Evans and Laithwaite plus the development of England suggests I may have been, but what is certain is that our transitional period is going to continue in 2015, and beyond, and the club need to plan on that basis, [inow[/i.

Westwood, J.Monas, Grix, Asotasi, Higham, Bridge & Atkins are, in varying degrees, now at or beyond their peak and the sands of time are trickling ever faster through the hourglass. We need to start planning exit strategies for these immediately and bringing the next Ben Evans, James Laithwaite into the setup immediately.

2014 wasn't our transitional season. It was the beginning of our transition, and we've made mistakes, we've recorded notable successes and we need to learn from it and continue to move forward apace.'"

All successful clubs are constantly going through transition but it only gets talked about as "transitional season" when there's a dip in form from the previous one. Ideally you want to avoid the situation where multiple key players retire at once but sometimes it can't be helped because you've had a generation of key players all around the same age and you don't want to move them all out prematurely because they are still class acts, and if you do it will get resentment. See the Chelsea situation where they brought in Andre Villas-Boas to manage the transition and move players on, he quickly got the senior players backs up and they rebelled against him because they felt they still had success in them, and they were right, under Di Matteo they won the Champions League. Now Mourinho has managed that actual transition perfectly by steadily bringing players in so the old guard can leave more on their terms and look how they are flying. It's not as easy in rugby league because of the salary cap, so you need to manage it through new signings coming in at the point they are exactly needed and not before. Hence Daryl Clark coming now rather than last season - it wouldn't have been a good use of salary cap to have Clark competing with Higham as second fiddle to Monaghan.

The other point with the age of players is 'building for the future' is pointless unless you are actually maintaining a level of success now: you will just develop players to be signed by other clubs, as happened to Arsenal for much of the past 6 or 7 years. If we brought through a golden crop of youngsters but were not in the mix for trophies then when their contracts were up we would face a real struggle holding off the NRL or Leeds/Wigan, just like we couldn't stop Harris and Sculthorpe leaving. So sometimes some older players are useful signings too, if you don't have a quality youngster available in a key position for the here and now, signing a quality 30 year old might give you 2 years of certainty and the situation may be different 2 years down the line, whereas going with an unknown quantity might leave you with a substandard player and no hiding place.