Interesting question; with the benefit of having longer to gauge things by now, how does Radford/Tony's recruitment compare to Gentle/McRae's in hindsight?

Personally, I'd say hits and misses for both. Possibly the former slightly better on paper, but IMO the latter better on the pitch. If you were to list out which players you'd get rid of, it's worrying how many of them are the current coach's choices yet again.

The difference is that Gentle had the ability to turn some of his makeshift signings into solid players who did a job for the team e.g Aspinwall, Pitts etc

Radford hasnt done this, even with his so called star signings like Sneyd. And to make things worse he got rid of two of our better players in Crooks and Heremaia and replaced them with duds. One step forward, three steps back.

They certainly were. It's worth remembering that Sneyd was 2nd for try assists last year and 6th for attacking kicks. Pryce was in the top five for try assists too until Frayssinous decided to not pick him.

Has to be down to the lack of attacking strategy at Hull that their games are struggling.

I'd say they both have a poor record of signings. Over the last 4 years our only genuine top class signing has been Ellis. Paea has proven to be a quality buy, and a couple of others such as Talanoa have performed ok considering they won't be amongst the top earners.

Aside from that it's been a revolving door of average players who either weren't up to it, or should have been given longer to prove themselves as we haven't replaced them with better. Gentle's mistake was making too many changes after a strong finish in 2012, in hindsight we could have kept the likes of Aspinwall and McGoldrick for another year as they were performing and we didn't bring better in.

During this time we've also lost genuine quality like Manu, Moa, Briscoe & O'Meley and lost great young talent in Turner and Crooks and not replaced them. The overall problem is we approach our transfer dealings like a kid in a sweet shop and snap up any old 'hasbeen' or 'never going to be' with no plan, whereas other teams sort the spine of the team out and then fill the squad up with young players.

Sneyd was poor in the last few games of 2014. In the Cup Final, he was actually subbed off. He is a cracking player but somethings not right.

Houghton, Yeaman, Whiting have to go for a start at the end of the year. Sorry, but they're weak links.

hate to say it but if peformances dont pick up, we will be looking for players to replace half the first team!

we will be shopping around the championship as that is where we will be if donkey radford stays in charge!

There's still some gems to be had from the Championship if you scout properly (which we don't!) players like Walmsley At Saints and Hill at Wire started off down there, and let's not forget our last period of success was built upon signing players like Raynor, Carvell and Shaun Briscoe who were residing in the reserves at their clubs, Whiting from Fev, McMenemy from Halifax etc you can pick up some bargains if you do it right. But we tend to go in for the players who last did something of note 5 years ago!

On the whole, it's not the squad that is the main issue. Our main issue is that no matter who we recruit we will see the same stagnation under the current coach. We saw exactly the same under Agar - he lacked the ability to develop players and so does Radford - they start to go backwards and as a result the team becomes predictable and devoid of the basic skills.

It really is like groundhog day, and the most depressing thing is the cycle was broken after Agar left and we were seeing the start of good things under Gentle - I really thought we'd seen the back of the dark days three years ago. I think this is why a lot of people are finding it so hard to stomach this time around, we were out of the woods only to find ourselves needlessly plunged back into the thickest part.

We need a new hooker,some of the passes Houghton gave out on Friday was shocking and he got caught at acting half when they was down to 12 men.I have said about Sa's fitness before and maybe offloading him but I may be a bit contreversial here and say Ellis is as much injury prone now.

Was talking about this with Mrs Kosh yesterday and the list of players we'd like to keep was depressingly short. Houghton, Sa, and Ellis weren't on it BTW for the very reasons you state.

interesting as ithink a lot of blame goes houghtons way but if he played for a top team would be up there amongst the top hookers, Sa is a strange one as imo dont think hes second row more centre where he can do a lot of damage but has injury doubts as goes with ellis, but when on the field hes still a top player, trouble is will he stay injury free, sods law we let him go he joins say leeds and plays the next 3 years injury free lol,

Houghton would look far better in a team where he didn't have to play so many minutes, and make so any tackles.
Be careful what you wish for and all that.
Even Thurston would look like a Championship player in our current set up.

We dont need any new players. This team needs a new coaching team/ethos - that is all

For me, there are 3 categories to break players down into: Those to definitely keep, those to give another year's opportunity (preferably under another coach) to earn further time, those to ditch. Category 1 is worryingly sp these days. Thinking positively, Category 2 is probably more occupied than 3, though.

Hard to recruit a better coach than Radford? There are 5/6 in the championship that would love yo come here, plenty of coaches in the NRL that would do a miles better job.

Let's be honest there are many armatures coaches who could improve our attacking play and understand how to use subs effectively.

Short term (and long term assistant) I'd take Glen Morrison, highly respected in SL and the NRL and doing a great job at Dewsbury.