Don't want him anywhere near Wigan; or Saracens for that matter. I don't think he has anything new to offer. Great player but let him go coach elsewhere.

No I'm not. Kevin Sinfield has indeed been a great captain. It is not to denigrate him to say that others are more worthy of the title Sportsperson of the Year. You understand the point surely?

Just a wild guess. The fact that you even write that last sentence suggests not.

Anyone who was that good has INSTANT respect. Of course that may not last if you turn out to be as successful as Garry Schofield, for example. It is much harder for a coach who hasn't played at the top level to gain respect, because many players have a "show me your caps" mentality, so a great player has a head start.

Wild guesses seem to be your forte.

You here admit that being a former top player and a good coach are not necessarily the same thing. Schofield is indeed the perfect example of that. But closer to home we had Andy Gregory and Andy Goodway, while even Ellery Hanley failed to deliver on his early coaching promise. Conversely, two of the best coaches Wigan have had in modern times - Graham Lowe and Michael Maguire - were non-too-memorable as players.

So why would you take a gamble on Farrell?

All I'm saying is that I'd need proof before I gave him the top job. Not hand it to him on the basis of a guess.

As you know I'm happy with Shaun Wane, so I'm not advocating a return for Faz. If we were looking for a head coach I'd be perfectly happy to have him.

Your recollection may be better than mine but didn't Ellery win the thing in his first year with Saints only to then get the push? So he never really got the chance to deliver did he?

Ellery did win in his first year at Saints, and I'm sure could have gone on to be one of the greats. But for various reasons he seems to have fallen out with the St Helens board. And whatever those reasons were, he found no further work in top-level RL and ended up vanishing into obscurity in RU. He returned to Cas years later and then somewhere like Doncaster, but I don't recall either of those appointments lasting very long.

Whether he was ever 'given a chance' is a moot point, but we know from our experience that Ellery wasn't always the easiest person to work with, so he may well have been the agent of his own misfortunes. I'd argue that being a successful coach may require you to be a diplomat and a politician as well as a taskmaster on the training field. But I only mention Ellery to try and illustrate that even the greatest players don't always have the full set of tools to go on to become great coaches too.