You're right - it's not exactly a priority area!

He is a good player though.

We won't be challenging next year? We are challenging this year with a massive injury list, playing away every week and had the eastmond saga to deal with!

We will be stronger next year playing at home, good quality players coming in and the great batch of young players we have will be a year older.

Good post mate, you made me laugh.

Really?

I also read on the superleague.co.uk article that Saints will be losing Leon Pryce as well. Does anyone know which club he's going to?

Another one we've missed out on.

This will come back to haunt us.

Then you obviously dont understand the importance of experience within a team. Imagine where we would be without Hoffman this year or Deacon last year; look how much we struggled without Gleeson until Pat came back in. He is a BRILLIANT signing and noone cares about Saints signing him its just those fans that used to say the same things about us signing aussies that is annoying but at the end of the day. Saints themselves didnt come out saying "how dare wigan sign Hoffman and Lima" it was a select few of their fans so technically you can only moan about those fans not the team the board and dont even understand why you included the RFL?

Reckon him and his brother will end up at Bradford next year. Leon see out his career at his hometown club and Karl getting his last chance in the city he's from. If anything can fire him up its gotta be playing for his hometown club. Not sure how he was treated by them when he left etc though so may not but I think Leon is about 75% certain that Bradford is his destination.

Ive never heard of Laffranchi?



Is he any good?

Doesnt what saints are doing remind you of where we were at 5/6 years ago? - Star names retiring / jumping ship, and in desperation offering vastly inflated salaries to big names to try and keep pace with the top of the table?

Saints paid more than we were able to afford for Shenton and LMS if rumours are to be believed, and they're now outbidding NRL teams with much higher salary caps than your average SL club, for average antipodeans with big reps!

It makes you wonder how balanced their salary cap must be - certainly nowhere as near as ours. While Saints will just about manage to keep pace this season - I'd expect them to finish 3/4th, I expect them to dip to 5/6th next year and the next few after that.

Quite simply this wont work for them, they will end up with a very unbalanced team and shallow squad and the likes of Laffranchi / O'haia / LMS/ Shenton, whilst being good players, are not good enough to step into the boots of Cunningham / Graham / Long / Eastmond etc, the same as Pongia / Craig Smith / Vaelaiki / Orr / Seuseu / Fletcher etc, were no Farrell / Newton / Cassidy / Cowie / Farrell etc for us.

Saints are certainly in transition.

Very good.

Laffranchi will be your Bryan Fletcher which is a much better comparison IMO. Bailey was always a poor mans Fletcher, but then Fletcher was a poor Mans Farrell - just as Laffranchi would be a poor mans Sculthorpe or Graham.

Double post