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.