Quote ="Shabino"The trouble is you can take none of this for granted. Saints were lucky to a degree to get Ben Barba. He was the spark for all of this. They’ve made some good calls, had good luck on injury front, but there are sooo many factors involved wit creating a winning team. Leeds has tried and our time will come again as some good young players pushing through again.'"
Holbrook was the spark - if anything Barba was a distraction which completely blew up our 2018 season (adding to our chokers tag). If we were lucky for anything it was getting Salford in the 2019 Grand Final, who were just as cagey and awestruck as we were, helping us finally get the monkey off our back, before Woolf came in and added a huge amount of steel to our mentality. I'm not sure we would have beaten Leeds or Wigan (or maybe even Warrington if you look at the CC final ... though different circumstances which I won't comment on) in how we played that game. Still remember the 2017 Magic Weekend against Hull though - it was crazy the difference Holbrook had made before he even started. Lots of fans (myself included) thought we needed a complete squad overhaul in that offseason, yet Holbrook kept everything the same and the rest was history.
As for injuries, this is a complete myth. We played the vast majority of last season without our 3,4,5 or 7 (and 6's left arm was out from Easter) and regularly missing 7-9 players a game at points last season, with our backrowers playing take turns on bans + people like Walmsley and Makinson picking up injuries here and there. I think a lot of people ignore this, because we tend to have a couple of experienced players outside of the matchday squad (people like Hurrell, Norman and Bell) as well as a currently brilliant line of talent from the junior ranks, from people who can do a job and fill a gap (Ben Davies, Dan Hill, Sam Royle) who you don't particularly notice, but that's what you need when filling gaps, through to the Welsbys and Dodds who are future stars, so we always seem better off than we are. It seems like Leeds recruitment this year is starting to copy this model.
