A little?

Mr Hetherington takes a fair lump of the blame for this hole we find ourselves in, but we have less chance of him being removed than we do the Coaching staff. A decent coach would not have us scratching our heads every week and would put patterns in place for this team of rapidly ageing has-beens to work to.

During that 5yrs we've won 3 GF's on the bounce ,LLS,WCC appeared in the CC final.
We've seen Hall ,Smith ,Watkins ,Bjb ,Burgess ,Clarkson ,Mcshane ,Singleton ,Elliott , all come through from our acadamy whilst we've signed promising youngsters Pitts ,Hardaker and Ambler and taken a chance on Coady and Amor.
From outside we've signed Webb ,Donald,Leuleui ,Peacock ,Buderus, Delaney ,Eastwood ,Cross and Hauraki re-signed Smith and managed to retain Sinfield ,Mcguire ,Burrow ,Senior etc etc.
Now lets not deny we have some issues re-Coaching and some past it players and those that didn't work out at present but the above post is the biggest Bollox you've ever posted what a villain GH has been in the last 5yrs PMSL!!!!

If Smith, Watkins, Burgess ,Clarkson, Mcshane ,Singleton, Elliott are the standard you have produced in the last five years then god help you.

Look back at the U21/U20 results and tables from those years and let's see who talking Bollox.

Delaney, Eastwood, Cross and Hauraki, great signings!!

Pitts, Hardaker, Coady, Ambler and Amor come on, only Hardaker looks useful.

What have results and tables of u20/21's got to do with you saying GH has failed for 5 fecking years???
Lets compare with how great your CEO has done over the same period shall we ?
1 GF win and some acadamy products you decided not to sell whilst signing players like Bailey ,Tim Smith and Phelps.
Our Current acadamy teams have plenty of potential to produce more quality so i'd say that's back on track.
Now if you'd said things have gone a bit wrong in the last couple of years you may have a point especially recruitment wise but 5yrs???? Again total bollox.
You and any club in SL would swop the last 5yrs we've had especially success wise so get a grip and stop being a drama queen.
Yes i know how many products are from your acadamy team currently and i know yopu won the GF last year now what about the other 4?

I would say you have both miscommunicated here, yet both on similar lines.

I took Rogues post to say the mismanagement of the youth system, then seperatley his signings over the last 5 years.

Break that down, and we have agreed often on the way the youth system was been run in the previous 3 years has been a massive step backwards to what it was previous to 2005.

Our last quality signing was Peacock at the end of 2005. Therefore it would be fair to say our signings over last 5 years have been poor.

I don't think Rogues is that far from the actual on this. A few of us have been saying it for a while now, Hetherington has performed poorly in his role for the last couple of years, and he needs to get back to doing what he does best.

You don't consider Webb to have been a quality signing?

You don't consider Eastwood to have been a quality signing. All right, it didn't pan out but his pedigree was top notch.

And finally, you mean you don't consider Buderus to have been a quality signing?

Singleton has recently captained his country? If that is a poor standard what does that say about Wigans youngsters at that age group?
Watkins is the future England centre.
Burgess is now playing in the NRL - How is Flanagan doing btw?

You got me.

I was actually talking about transfers between super league clubs. But I can see Rogues was talking full stop.

125 and only been online for about 12 hours, one signature every 6 minutes is good going....spread the word, who knows how many we will have before the Hull game. It is after all our day!!!

In my opinion this club started to go downhill after 2005 when it was revealed that Bradford Bulls cheated the salary cap in order to become champions that year. This year and last year in some ways is parallel to 2005 and 2006. In 2005 and 2010 we had reasonable seasons despite not become champions them years. Unfortunately 2006 and 2011 are probably the most unbearable years in super league that Rhino fans have had to endure. Mind you I’m sure that the Dean Lance years come close too.

In 2007 it was announced that Tony Smith was leaving the Rhinos club and we went on to win the Grand Final that year. The one thing that Tony Smith has become good at is coaching teams to pull off impressive victories in one off games. However they was no doubt in my mind that 2007 was the right time to go for Tony Smith because the rugby at Headingley was becoming very stale indeed under him. The 2007 win only papered over the cracks. If my memory serves well Leeds Rhinos only seemed to get up for super league games in 2007 that they needed to like Games against St Helens. The challenge cup however was a totally different matter.

For the next two seasons this was replicated under the leadership of Brian McClennan very well indeed. How on earth we won the league leaders in 2009 is anyone’s guess but we certainly didn’t win it by putting in a great effort during that season (2009). In fact we put in a similar boring and disinterested effort that we put in this season (2011).

Ever since 2005 I have seen season upon season decline in quality. Oh we’ve had some fantastic games since then but super league is full of mediocrity. Leeds Rhinos could play mediocre against a mediocre team and still come away with a victory. What has happened at the club is complacency and that complacency has finally caught up with the club.

I agree with the saying that ‘if it isn’t broke then don’t fix it’ and the complacency during the seasons 07 – 09 worked very well in the clubs favour. The price paid for that complacency hasn’t been too high yet but it’ll be interesting to see if Gary and Paul ever do bring success to Headingley again.

Bass Headingley anyone? It's nice to see the usual suspects on here mithering on.

Successful business on paper. Secure bank balances. Self funded transfers rather than borrowing. Real plans for the future of the club. No promotion and or relegation. A shortage of quality on the open market. Building slowly for a good future.

And more importantly, showing us just who are the post 2004 bandwagoners who now claim ownership of "Their beloved club".

The opposition fans taunt us and take the mick about how far the "Mighty" have fallen. Sad thing is, if people hadn't be poncing about like Hyacinth Bucket and Lording it like Fauntleroy whilst we were on top then we wouldn't be getting the flack now.

I remember at the end of WIgans era of dominance, when for I think the third time in a row Wigan came to HQ to get beaten, a Wigan fan on the WT was humorously heard to remark, "You're making a bluddy habit of this".

I wish certain posters on here would accept the fall from grace of their "beloved" club with the same degree of stoicism.

and of course Gareth Ellis !!!!!

Didn't he sign at the beginning, rather than the end of, 2005?

Well it says that Wigan had more players in that England team than Leeds had, and that none of the Leeds players actually came from Leeds (not that the last bit really matters

)

A serious question now, did the decline of the Leeds youth systems start with Bastion leaving or was it prior to that when Dean Bell left?

IIRC there was once quite a sensible debate, AP, G1, Spicy, Oldham, McF, Calla, Chimp, maybe not Chimp, the other usual protagonists, that concluded that the youth set up and the quality it produced in DMc, RB , RM, CW, TMFMISL etc was in no small part down to Dean Bell, and that his departure was going to prove to be a real loss in time.

Are you serious?

You're embarrassing

well maybe, but its basically the same time frame we were discussing

The club must have made good money with all the finals over the last decade. A hell of alot more than most of SL. Not much to show for it on the pitch IMO at present.
The challenge cup against Hull is a must win now, or Pinky and Perky should be sent packing.
If we loose against Hull in the cup, a caretaker coach should be appointed and Hetherington needs to get a top coach from the NRL for next season, plus some better recruits too.

However you are speaking of supporters of sporting clubs, a band of people who traditionally cannot accept the fact that in sport you are either in a winning cycle or a losing cycle and when you are in the losing cycle its because its someone else's turn to win.

I often wonder what on earth some people do in their life outside of rugby league to make the subject so important to them, not a lot I suspect, thats understandable if you're 15 years old and nothing has really happened in your life to date but some of these people are adults FFS.

Our great crop of academy players that became the backbone of the successful years were a mixture of good player management AND luck. Even Manchester United haven't managed to replicate the Giggs, Beckham and Neville crop that starred for so long in their team. We were lucky that a great batch of youth players came through in that era and it is unlikely it will happen again any time soon. What we are seeing now with the likes of Watkins and BJB is probably more realistic.

What has disappointed me the most is that we no longer sign players the quality of Peacock and Ellis. When promising players at clubs like Cas and Salford decide to move on its to our (so called big club) rivals across the Pennines.

Sackcloth and ashes.

The preferred attire of stoic supporter.

And Manchester United didn't have a crop of young players that good since the Busby team that died in Munich.

This, for me, is part of the problem. There is no such thing as a "production line" of talent and no club, not even those who can attract the better youngsters from the better amateur clubs, can keep bringing through "batches" of 5/6/7 quality youngsters as we did in the early 2000s. We'll get the odd one or two come through, as we are doing with the likes of Watkins, BJB, but it will be a long time before local young lads are the 'backbone' of the team in they way that they have been in the past decade.



When your youth system isn't bearing fruit the way it used to, that is when the salary cap starts to hit you.

You can get away with paying kids next to nothing and, if you look at the 17 from the 2004 Grand Final, I bet that you could pick out at least two players who would have been on less (or at best, barely more) than £20k. When those players become older, with a few GF winners rings, World Club championship medals and GB / England caps, you can't keep paying them that. The chances are that the likes of Ian Kirke, Jamie Jones-Buchanan, Luke Burgess, Ali Lauitiiti and a few others probably represent very poor value in the context of the salary cap. In the past, we have had younger players doing a similar or better job for considerably less that we are paying those players today, which frees up cash for bigger name signings. We don't have that spare cash any more and we don't have the players in the junior ranks to replace those that are "tying up" (for want of a better expression) that money.

A very good assessment.