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.

Spot on the signing of any young player for a 5 year contract eg Burrows, Maguire, Tomkins will impact on the break through of other young players. Its great to develop a team from your academy but as long as young players are not lost to the game I don't care were they are developed or were they end up playing.

This is a point that often gets missed when older players are signed. At Warrington Rhys Evans was just starting to emerge as a big prospect in the academy and we signed Brett Hodgson, some fans whinged about this saying if we are going to sign an Aussie, why sign one who is over 30, we should have signed a guy who was in his early 20s and could give us longer service....but if we'd done that it would have been very hard to keep Evans because he would have seen no light at the end of the tunnel.

Almost always fans will be negative when an older player is signed but sometimes the coaching staff will identify a potential prospect in the Academy who is a couple of years away from being a first teamer, and sign an older player for that position because the older player will just hold fort while you get the younger lad to bulk up and start to pick up some first team experience as a fringe player. Otherwise sometimes players come through at the wrong time and they want to leave because they don't want to be second string, this is how we got Briers from Saints and Hull got Briscoe from Wigan (Radlinski was still in his 20s when Briscoe came through and nobody knew then that his career would end fairly young).

Also in football I've often heard United's youth team being criticised because people said "they produced a load of players in 1992, but then there were only the odd one like Brown, O'Shea and Fletcher emerge in the next decade and a half"....yes....because all those guys from the team of 92 were in the team for the long term. The only way you can keep churning players out of the Academy into the first team is if the previous cohort were not good enough to stay long term.

When will we learn to keep an hold of our better players. just hope we wake up

Grix was only 12 when he made his debut for halifax in the year they only had a salary cap of 300k.

that would buy matt kings right leg this year, sadly thats the one be injured at MM

you know what, thats annoyed me for ages now, its murder reading the league express championship pages and seeing that gary broadbent or darren holt has switched between barrow or whitehaven or workington, again. or ian watson is still playing and doing the rounds. Or the gibbons brothers(i know they've retired).