Quote: Mild Rover "16 wins this year is a decent return, especially as you continued to struggle to consistently put out a settled hb pairing. Unfortunately for Agar the season drifted a bit at the end (although he couldn't have afforded a slow start to the year) and the play-off defeat came against the worst possible opponent - it wouldn't have been so bad vs Huddersfield, for example. A victory would have been against the best possible opponent, of course, and then the memories would have been more of the rousing double over Saints and three (or even 4!) derby wins. Though hard not to today, it is unfair to judge progress on one game - and I'd think the same if you'd won and were getting carried away with Old Trafford here we come threads.
That said you are very one dimensional, struggle to be at your best consistently and if you want to be competing on an even footing with the very best teams you need to squeeze more value out of the cap.
The stats post was fair and interesting, but Agar only took over midway through 2008 iirc, so is the end of Sharp's reign being included there?'"
Agar was in charge for more or less the whole of 2008 as Sharp had gone by May, I discounted the 2007 season intentionally as far as the stats where concerned as I had though Sharp had gone in 2007 however this wasn't the case. One area my stat post may have been slightly unfair is that in terms of entertainment McRea seemed to produce the greatest return on investment as he ended the 2004 season with a plus 365 points difference and also beat 4 teams by more than 31 points, 4 teams by 21-30 and 5 by 11-20 (it was the year we dusted Salford and Widnes by more than 70 points each) so essentially McRea did more in one season than the next 3 coaches could muster in the last 6 in!! Whilst I appreciate we've won the Challenge Cup (my greatest day as an FC fan) and also been to Old Trafford (the year we finished 2nd 50% of our 20 wins came by 10 points or less and we only won 1 by 31 or more) in those 6 years we have IMOH seen a dramatic decline in quality and entertainment since McRea left the club and the stats would certainly appear to back this up.
