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.

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

Dream on!
Exactly my point though - Wigan, when we lost a large part of our old guard replaced with state of origin internationals / NZ test players etc in Fletcher, Seu Seu, Vaeleki, Pongia, Smith etc. but they weren't good enough to fill the shoes of Farrell, Cowie, Cassidy, Newton etc. The same will happen with Saints IMO - While you might not fall as far as us (Agent Millward being the main cause of that) - I would expect Saints to have a few seasons back floating around the 5th/ 6th in the table mark.

The fact that you have so many young lads left in the team and are plugging gaps with overseas players on large salaries will lead resentment amongst the younger guys in the squad. You will end up just as wigan did 5 years ago with young lads on £15k per season, while older players will be bringing in £150-200k p/a and an extremely unbalanced shallow squad.

If I was very bored, which I am not, I could point you to posts on here that said the same thing about Saints last season and this season. Last season, despite being in this freefall of which Wigan fans dream, we finished second and got to a Grand Final. This year, in spite of having even worse injuries than last and having to play a number of inexperienced and debutant players, we are joint first so far, higher than you at present on points difference. People will keep on writing us off! But please, carry on. We don't mind at all.

Good post mate, I was one of the fans saying good on Wigan for bringing in 3 storm players. If you can do it and have to do it then that's how it goes.

Pongia and smith were outstanding and played with the players you say they replaced.

Love the Gibbs write up on wikipedia

"Gibbs has requested an early release from his contract to join Super League Club StHelens for the 2012 season. When questioned on the matter Gibbs said "The exchange rate and the new NRL deal are strong pulls to remain in Sydney but when Saint's offered me a Benidorm flat in Shaw St. and Jamie Foster's fake VXR , I had to request the move"

What's so funny? It's true!

How long was Wigan's empty before last year? Would it have been justified to write Wigan off in 2010 on the back of that? Or Wire before 2009?

Strange argument.