Talk about signings hit and miss
All Hodgsons signings have been a miss
Not one signing has improved the team

Not sure it helps either when our conditioning head and Physio are running their own businesses at the same time.
Taylor the same.I know he has had injuries but done nothing now for three seasons
Dont know if any of the other players have outside business but wouldnt surprise me if Gale has

As much as Taylor is doing my nut in, I don't think you can criticise him for looking after himself once his rugby career is over. These guys ain't footballers.

20 years ago nearly with loads of money and a golden generation emerging. What Radford did at Hull is more impressive, in many ways. You can chuck in Smith’s time at Wire and the scales are still not far off balanced.

After 25+ years of SL how do we define success and failure? I’d say there is a huge, possibly now unbridgeable, gulf between how it is defined by small number of top SL clubs and the rest. 10 years ago, I could convince myself that if another club got this or that just right they could maybe join the elite or displace one of them. Now, it feels really unlikely. We’re left hoping for a Leicester City 15-16, one amazing year, scenario. It’s by no means unique to SL - all the big football leagues in Europe have massive issues with competitive imbalance. But it’s understood and acknowledged. In RL people don’t seem to have come to terms with it and spout all sorts of (imo) rubbish about the salary cap or bringing through kids to keep it a strange mystery.

Let's be honest, that Leeds squad massively underachieved before Smith arrived this season.

Same with Holbrook at Saints and McGuire at Wigan.

We've got an average squad when everyone is fit nevermind one with half of it missing.

You might have an average squad but the coach is getting a below average performance from them. You cannot blame present injuries for the performance over nearly two seasons.,

I had us in the top 6 this season if we stayed fit and a few things went out way. We're where I thought we'd be this season. Same with 2021. I thought we'd make more of a fist of it again in 2020, but we just scraped the play offs.

Pretty much the same thing happened in 2019 and 2018.

A pattern has developed here..... We're a mid table team and have been for a while. A lot of the players from 2018/19 are still here when the rot/complacency started.

Is the coach perfect? No, but sticking a Woolfe or Holbrook here with the squad and injuries we've had I bet we'd get similar results.

Holbrook took a mid table team under Cunningham and got them to within a minute of a Grand Final in his first season. Woolf has dealt with 7/8/9 injuries all year this year and is still demanding the same results as previous years. Away from Saints, you can see the impact Smith has had at Leeds.

Don’t underestimate the impact a coach can have. Even things like injuries can be influenced through training methods, and even things like morale and motivation can impact certain types of injuries.

That’s not to say new coaches are a silver bullet - management need to understand the playing group they have, and how they respond to different coaching techniques. That’s the difference between Saints appointing Holbrook compared to Warrington appointing Powell for example

Difference is those Saints teams are a just a smidge better than Hulls. Those Saints teams were/are littered with internationals.

For me, Our problems run deeper than the coach. Too much player power. The senior players have downed tools under 3 coaches now.

It wasn’t a team of internationals when Cunningham was here. Our 2017 squad only had 3 non fed players to start the year, in Ryan Morgan (the new Jamie Lyon according to KC) Luke Douglas and Dom Peyroux. We had an older generation (Lomax, Makinson, Wilkin, Roby, LMS) who were mostly considered done, and associated with the “5 in a row” legacy of failure, the new generation had promised so much in 2014 but seemingly petered out by 2016, with Swift, Richards (the best of the bunch according to our fans) Percival and Thompson all faltering the previous year. Add in the luminaries Matty Smith, Tommy Lee and Jack Owens, it was [ihighly[/i expected that when Holbrook came in that there was going to be a Warrington style clear out needed to get them back to be competitive. That isn’t what transpired (thankfully) but we certainly weren’t seen as in a good position prior to Holbrook joining.

Alternately, we had 0 players in the 2016 dream team.

Only sense I can make of all this is Pearson has given the okay to write this season off knowing we’re safe and certain players know they’re going. Hodgson has got a lot wrong but to his credit we seem to be making the right sort of signings.

Like others have said, we need a much bigger back room. We’re well behind the rest of the league on conditioning.

Maybe I underestimated the 2017 squad, but the point is, you can still argue it underachieved under KC. Roby, Walmsley, Lomax, Wilkin, Makinson. Good players then, good players now.

The quality was always there.

Are Saints the only team to have made the play offs every season? Some pedigree.

I'd rather us stick with BH until next season, if he's allowed to clear out more of the squad. Maybe I'm mad, put I'm convinced the players would throw a new guy under the bus. We've crashed since probably 2015. Why would this playing group do any different for another coach?

I bet if you look back from at least 2018 we'll have had the most 30/40 point defeats. A chunk of that 2018 squad is still here.

FWIW I think Woolf is probably the best coach SL has seen. He edges out Daniel Anderson for me.

Now there’s some differences in norms and expectations.

To save anybody else checking back, Saints finished 4th in 2016, with 20 wins and 10 losses, 3 points behind LLS winners Warrington who beat them 18-10 in the play-off semi-finals.

I don’t doubt that it genuinely felt like hard times and that 5 grand final losses in a row was really painful - always the bridesmaid, and all that. Although they did win the CC twice in the same period, to complete a threepeat.

But as fans we’re talking across an ocean of mutual incomprehension at this point. Maybe we could ask a middle-aged Bradford fan to translate.

It'll be interesting to see the squad rotation for the second set of compressed fixtures next weekend... Houghton can't do 80 minutes Thursday and 80 minutes Sunday....can he?