Phew…pnb, thought you said pub for a second…
Not again I thought. I had visions of the London Bridge and card schools.

Typo, I did actually mean pub.

No they couldn`t do that, they have to be loyal to their homegrown players that have been developed in their Academy.

They do have a point, we’ve been here before signing academy products on birth contracts. Morgan Smith being the most obvious.

We shouldn’t be that club, given the academy that we have, but we are.

That said, Peet has just dangled the carrot for Nicholson to get his head down and work hard.

Peet does seem to have let a bit of success go to his plasticine head.

Wigan have been quite successful this year on the back of some inspired performances by two Australian imports. They won the cup fair and square, albeit Huddersfield should have put the game to bed before Wigan got a sniff of a comeback.

They're doing well but if he is already trading in the 'humble lad from my hometown' persona for the more traditional 'we are Wigan, look how mighty we are' I can see his popularity outside of the town falling quite quickly.

I don’t have a problem with any gloating from Wigan fans on our low period up to 2009, and can’t argue with any criticism of our recent NRL recruitment. However, it’s a bit silly slating the academy which has actually produced a decent number of products for us since the TS era. Admittedly not in the numbers of Saints, Leeds or Wigan, but they were blessed with lots more local talent (remember RL clubs weren’t as abundant in our ‘split’ town) and they had seen more recent success which meant they were more popular clubs with better structures in place.

I think we can be pretty happy with how we’ve progressed since our resurrection as a big club. In the England squad at the end of last season we had four Warrington-born players, Not bad when you consider that 20 years ago we were almost relegated with crowds of 3000 seen as a normal thing.

As for Peet, that’s incredibly childish. He’s right about the strength of his academy, it’s just a shame his club keeps them out by signing so many players from external sources. Like any other RL club?

You have signed a cracking young player. Assuming he does kick on (and I’m sure he will) don’t expect him to be around for too long when the NRL comes calling.

Hey, it’s my job to ask the questions so pack it in!

Perhaps the development of our youngsters has been affected by the club/coach mentality of trying to buy success instead of introducing & integrating the kids into the first team like Powell is doing. Getting into the first team for youngsters has generally depended on coaches having no other players to choose from. Perhaps we are missing a development stage somewhere between the youth system & first team standard.

wasn't really a question, i saw it more as soliloquy

I thought I'd spotted Gyles Brandreth in the South Stand, apparently it wasn't a look a like

You know, I’m going to give some credit to Steve Price here. When KissKamOut TM (trademark Dallas) recruited Price, he said that our new coach wanted to change the structures behind the scenes to make the transition from academy to first team more like the NRL system. I’m not sure exactly what he changed, but it seems to have made a big difference considering our young players haven’t looked out of place on debut compared to days of old. Of course we then brought in the likes of Anderson which no doubt helped.

It’s interesting to see that Price is doing a similar role in Aus now and seems to be quite highly regarded. Maybe this is where his strength lies, and maybe he will leave an unseen legacy under the surface at Warrington.

He didn’t pay me to write this BTW…

What you say stacks up fare, until match day, where that process ideal falls down, Price would never bring them on from the sub bench!

What always makes me laugh about the debate about young players on here is that it is the same every year.

You could go back 20 years and hear about how Steve Anderson was doing great things behind the scenes with our youth system and how DVDV had set up the scholarship with William Beamont and how it would bear fruit over the next few years.

There's always some story about how England Academy has more Warrington players than Wigan or Saints or whatever and what a great generation we have got coming through.

Then no superstars come through and we get told that actually those players had the talent, it was just that they didn't get their chance in the first team. And yet we've had lots of rank average home grown players come through and play 50 odd first team games before being moved on and spending the rest of their careers at lower SL teams or lower leagues. And none of the supposed top talents who weren't getting a chance with us ever seem to get picked up by other SL clubs and given a chance there.

The explanation is invariably "poor coaching" where these players were 'ruined' by Cullen / TS / Price. Well Powell seemed to do OK in terms of developing players in the first team at Leeds over 2001 to 2003 so that argument is going to be harder to use going forwards.