Quote: Red Hot Jalapeno "I hope Noble does get sacked or walks away. The reason being i am sick to death of idiots like Jonh,Diesel and DaveO blaming Noble for everything and desperate for the man to fail. All those bandwagoners who have jumped on the truck should hold there heads in shame as well as the majority of you blasted Lindsay and Whelan no end for sacking coaches and claimed we needed stability. Sacking coaches was what triggered the downfall of Wigan in the first place and led to new coaches wanting to change the squad around time and time again. Noble has half built the team yet is still missing vital players in key positions. If you think any coach could do better with such a poor front row and a cr@p 7 and inexperienced 6 then you need a reality check. The days of teams lying down and rolling over for Wigan have long gone and the facts are teams have overtook us and the salary cap has made sure that the competition is more even and anybody can beat anybody. The only way to sucseed nowaday is to build a team over a good few years and get some stabilty across the board not press the panic button when things are not going right. Warrington pressed the panic button with Cullen and have gone backwards if anything and have shown little sign of improvement under Tony Smith who the Noble haters regard as a master coach.'"
Jalapeno - there are many people who have been calling for BN to go for a while but without saying that he was the sole cause of our problems. Far from it. The players have their share of the blame and the backroom staff just aren't producing players with the right level of strength, power and fitness to allow the team to compete properly at SL level (yesterday being a prime example),
I have been saying for some time (and probably boring people almost as much as I do about the SC
) that there is a general malaise at the club. Standards have slipped across the board. I have been criticised for this by some (BK included, which just goes to show that while we agree on the SC we aren't actually the same person, as some Stains have alleged in the past!
) but absolutely stand by this comment.
Thinking positively about how the club can change this, to me the real issue is whether IL is going to start setting the agenda for success.
From what I have seen of the IL he is a genuine guy who cares about the club and actually cares about the fans. That's great, but if he's going to get us back challenging for honours he needs to raise ambitions and expectations.
Many posters on this board have this season been satisified with narrow defeats and mediocre performances. Many fans as well as the club have become infected with the disease of second rate syndrome.
What we need is for IL to start demanding nothing less than the best from the coaching and backroom staff and set expectations at a more appropriate level - realistic in the short term, but when he talks about the medium/long term he needs to start using language like "world class", "best in the world" etc.
We are Wigan, the greatest club in the world. For all his faults ML believed that, he made any doubters at Wigan believe it. He made the British RL world believe it (that's why some many envious people in RL hate us so much!). One night in Brisbane the Wigan club in its crowning achievement won the WCC, the greatest glory in a decade of unrivalled success (even outdoing the pummelling an all Wigan GB pack gave the Aussie pack on that famous night in Melbourne a couple of years earlier). We made even the Aussies believe it.
We may never - in the era of the SC (and general anti-Wigan bile and hatred) - get back to the top of that mountain but IL needs to aim high. A root and branch clear out of the club is necessary. We need new people, new ideas and most of all a new vision.
