As you know I'm happy with Shaun Wane, so I'm not advocating a return for Faz. If we were looking for a head coach I'd be perfectly happy to have him.

Your recollection may be better than mine but didn't Ellery win the thing in his first year with Saints only to then get the push? So he never really got the chance to deliver did he?

Ellery did win in his first year at Saints, and I'm sure could have gone on to be one of the greats. But for various reasons he seems to have fallen out with the St Helens board. And whatever those reasons were, he found no further work in top-level RL and ended up vanishing into obscurity in RU. He returned to Cas years later and then somewhere like Doncaster, but I don't recall either of those appointments lasting very long.

Whether he was ever 'given a chance' is a moot point, but we know from our experience that Ellery wasn't always the easiest person to work with, so he may well have been the agent of his own misfortunes. I'd argue that being a successful coach may require you to be a diplomat and a politician as well as a taskmaster on the training field. But I only mention Ellery to try and illustrate that even the greatest players don't always have the full set of tools to go on to become great coaches too.