TEAM BUT NO COACH

Quote: ChrisH "There's two issues here and has been for some time. Marrow has summed up perfectly the current position and essentially what the coach has to work with. The other issue is recruitment and retention. It's been poor for years and we can't put that at Radford's door. We've been looking for a scrum half for years , we knew that Tickle was going for ages and needed a goal kicker , we somehow allowed Briscoe to leave , we allowed Manu to go and even Turner hasn't been replaced by a better player. We were told that there were no halves available yet Saints knowing they have good but inexperienced halves just go out and get Walsh who also kicks goals. I think that McRae and our reputation from the previous regime did us a huge amount of damage and we ended up signing far too many players who were/are not good enough or past it and couldn't go anywhere else rather than what we needed. There's still an element of that as seen from the type of signings we've made where they can be said to be inspirational - Feka , Talanoa , etc or desperate depending on your point of view. AP and Radders have got to keep looking for the player that can manage the game on the field and in general for players to replace some of our aging forwards and Horne , Yeaman , Hazza , etc. To expect these to simply come from within our junior ranks is living in a dreamworld. Certainly develop our own but it's got to be I conjunction with a much better recruitment regime than we've had for many years. In the meantime we've got to get the best out of the guys we have and frankly we shouldn't expect miracles.'"

good post.