I know plenty of people who chose to start work straight from school rather than gain further qualifications to gain a better paying job. I also know plenty of people who are happy in their work and don't want a promotion regardless of the additional money.

Stop being dense. No one is suggesting it is IMPOSSIBLE for a kid starting at a very young age to have a long and successful career. Just as no one would suggest it is impossible for a heavy smoker to live till he's eighty years old. What science says is the odds are stacked against you. In any case, I find it bizarre that you should use Ali as a counterpoint since it could hardly be said he was fighting fit when he hung up his gloves. The guy exhibited visible signs of brain damage 10 YEARS before retirement. Indeed, most boxing historians are of the opinion that he was never the same fighter after he was banned from the sport immediately following the Zora Foley fight in '67.

I'm not being dense, simply pointing out that you make a flippant statement about science and yet didn't backup you statement with anything scientific. I'm yet to see a strong case that a 19/20 year old prop eased into the game fares any better at the age of 30+ than one "thrown in".

And yes, Ali was a bad choice but many footballers have been proven to suffer from minor brain damage from heading the ball. Office based workers suffer RSI and so on.

I would think most Boxing Historians are also of the opinion that the 3 1/2 years out of the ring after that Fight had more to do with his decline in standards on his return to it!
The Foley fight was deemed the pinnacle of his Boxing career and who knows how many years he would have stayed at that pinnacle and could possibly have got even better if not banned?
Who knows also if he would have retired earlier (Probably Not) if he had not been banned from 67 to late 70/71???

Bar those who say they aren't going anymore?

Do you think that this is part of the problem with the current seeming malaise of some fans, the ones who say they've had enough?

You experienced a massive high that year in avoiding relegation and it brought the fans together with the club for a period, you must have been thinking that it couldn't get any worse, yet instead of carrying on improving you seem to have settled into mediocrity for most of the season, only perking up for the play offs.

It's exactly the problem.

We should have used the near relegation as a second chance and you'd hope we'd have learned lessons but unfortunatly with a team chocked full of foreign players with bad attitudes we don't seem to have done.

I'd have thought our scrape with relegation would have rid the club and it's players of the 'we play for Wigan therefore we've got a devine right to win most matches' attitude but it hasn't!

I sometimes wonder if we'd have been better going down then coming back with a clean slate like Hull KR!

How many years did it take them to get back though?

I'm not so sure the relegation to clear the decks is an option these days. The gap between the top league and the second tier is far greater nowadays, and whilst I don't think you'd have had a problem recruiting a team good enough to get you straight back up, the subsequent recruitment would have been hard IMO. Added to that is the massive gap in the funding you'd have received for that year.

It took KR ages but i don't really remember the circumstances around that yet i'm sure they wouldn't have had the youth set up at that time that we've got now or the knowledge that even in a worse case scenario we'd get back in as a franchise after just 2 years(i think it was).

It's hard to say if we'd have been better off but i'd hazard a guess we may have been. You mention the recruitment once we got back up being harder but imo it would have been easier then it is now. We'd have unloaded huge contracts like Fieldens straight away allowing us a raft of leeway in salary cap space.

Guess we'll never know.

That's what I said.

Still living in the past. Change the record

Er the past 2 years yes..............

Not exactly, you intimated that he wasn't the same fighter down to age etc after the Foley fight to prove your point.

I'm saying it was nothing to do with his age but to do with th 3 1/2 years enforced absence.

If he had been allowed to fight on he may have stayed fitter etc meaning him progressing through his career with his original style of fighting?????

I know. But I'm buggered if I know what you are talking about.

I am just fed up of the whole thing we are so inconsistent, i don't get the feel that the team are anywhere near where they should be and i think something radical needs to be done to stop the mess and i think it needs to be done asap.

I am sure we have good players, but they aint living up to their true potential on a consistent basis. it was only a few weeks ago that Wigan were 4 unbeaten, defeated Saint's in that magic weekend thing and at that point i had high hopes that we could do something, but sinnce losing that tight game to Hull KR at the JJB the team have capitulated again just like they did at the start of the season.

Now they are going to go on like a 2/3 match winning streak at some point but they will lose again and here we are again. For things to change and just to give us fans some hope, Ian Lenagan needs to take action, and until he does something with the coaching situation then we are going to be stuck in this rut for a while yet!