Some quite ungracious comments I feel.

217 appearances for Hull. Fair enough, he might not be a match-winning headline-grabber and you'd be hard pressed to find one of those 217 games where he's won the game but, you'd also be hard pressed to find one that he's lost.

Realistically there were only two English props doing the rounds that could have been signed. McCarthy-Scarsbrook and Bryn Hargreaves. LMS was always going to choose St Helens while maybe Hargreaves could have been signed but I think his moving to Bradford took everyone by surprise.

There simply aren't any leading props available, hence why Rovers had to settle for keeping Wheeldon and why Hull have kept Dowes. No point weakening your squad just to make a statement.

I didn't respond to your Dickins comment, because you chose to ignore the fact that on that post, I prefixed the list with "Not saying we should sign all of these, but off the top of my head..."

I have only named 14 but that was only the first 4 clubs I glanced at. I could quite easily produce you a list of 30+ minimum if you like?

I would also like to see our youth progress, but Green nor Crooks are ready, and won't become ready watching Dowes play for 80 minutes whilst sat down as 18th man. The u21's is simply unable to harden players physically as the National League is.

I think Rugby League has something in common with Football in the shortage of players situation, in that it comes to how talent is spotted/developed at young ages. There's a tendency to go with the more physically developed kids over the naturally talented/skilful ones, emphasising power over craft, so plenty are lost to the game. With such a relatively small talent pool in our game already, it's an attitude we can little afford to remain IMO.

Agree with that bit a lot, and would also add mentally to it. I always said we should have had Tommy Lee playing in the NLs from 18 learning to play scrum half properly, and it's still something I don't think we take advantage of properly even with the dual contract situation now.

Same here.