Something I've been banging on about for the past five years.

What is better to be classed as a "feeder team" have competitive entertaining RL to watch or keep getting the same old faces off the NL roundabout and hope that one day your club will get into SL?

Sorry, I misread it. I meant an Australian NRL team. Each year one (or more) of our top U18/U20 players should go over there on a one (or two) years scholarship.

Why would NRL clubs agree to that? What benefit do they get out of it when they're producing young players 5x as good as ours?

It would be for the long term benefit of the game as a whole, particularly at International level which should be the pinnacle of sport.

I was copying and pasting the numbers, knew i would screw it up somewhere





Its all good and well having them in your squad and on loan (we have 23 in ours) but at the end od the day you just have 3 that are making the first team no matter what. That is ridiculously poor for such a big team. Hopefully when your older players retire then you will get more in the starting 13 but it doesnt always end up that way.

Whats your opinion of Mitchell? Quins fans seem to like him

Just noticed a small advert in the RL Express Keebra Park School Australia looking for students (Rugby players) to enrole for 2012. Former pupils Marshall and Chase. Would be interesting if some academy players went over.

Wasn't Simon Grix signed from Halifax AFTER he had made his Super League debut for them in 2003? I wouldn't personally count him as Warrington developed.

Hopefully the Wire fans are right and more will come through in the coming years and it does look promising. The game cannot grow without all our big sides producing home grown talent.

I've never paid much attention to his rugby skills because I can't look at anything bar his face. I've never seen someone as scary looking.

He looks like a cross between the elephant man and Mick Hucknall!

Tickle and Hodgson developed by Fax?

Warrington's youth set up now is as good as I can remember it, the club has put a lot in.

What you have to remember is Warrington is not really a rugby league heartland in the way that Wigan, Leeds or St Helens is, or even areas like Cas and Wakey. Its always had rugby league, but Warrington isn't historically a tight knit RL community where every kid wants to be a rugby player. At the end of the 1990s we were in a bad state, the club was bust and the youth set up had to be restarted from scratch.

So in the circumstances I think we have done pretty well to bring a handful of lads through to Super League.

However we are a long way from being able to compete with Wigan for participation numbers at junior level so Warrington are going to have to use a strategy of picking up young lads in other clubs' academy ranks who maybe the other club hasn't got at the top of the pecking order but we think they might have potential. This is good for the game as it gives lads a chance in SL who otherwise might have been stuck in reserves.

Then also there will be signing younger players who have come through other clubs into the first team and have potential but maybe some question marks...like Briers, Westwood and Bridge (and more recently Atkins and Ratchford).

Wigan have got a very professional set up and so they will always produce a surplus, now that there are a lot of good young players at Wigan I would expect a lot of younger players to end up being picked up by other clubs, it happened to Leeds a few years ago...young lads will hang around if there's a 30 year old in their position, hoping that in a couple of years they will get a shot but a lot of the Wigan players are going to be in the first team for 5 maybe 10 years to go so Academy lads will be looking elsewhere for opportunities.