Not being picky but, I think there's 12 or 13 in scholarship from Brook. There's some from Orrell, a couple from Clock and I think there's some from out of the area. I recon saints will dominate the north west matches at this age group.

Well players are not daft, they can see where the money is, if I was a player with a decent history, but realising that the current club are getting ready to move on, I'd be looking for a chairman with a big cheque book.

Wigan's problem has never been producing talented kids, but in taking them the next step, and integrating them into the first team squad. This is an area of development that teams like Saints and Leeds have been far more successful at, and also clubs like Huddersfield have benefitted from taking the Wigan failures, and turning them into first team players.

It should be noted that Wakey finished 4th in the under-20s which was higher than Saints and Leeds.

I don't think we can really assess where Saints were up to at the u20s level due to the degree of disruption caused by first team injuries. I think they went down to a loss, for example, when a bunch of them were taken off to London to play for the first team against Quins. After all, the u20s is there to produce first team players, not to win u20s grand finals or league leaders (even though competing is obviously part of a player's development).

Leeds, who have won 5 from the last 8 titles have produced an awful lot of youngsters.
Hall, BJB, possibly Ablett, Sinfield, McGuire, Bailey, JJB, Clarkson and Burrow are all from their academy.
Hardacker was signed as a youngster a la Wilkin and I'm not sure where they got Kirke from, but I'm pretty sure they developed it.

When Bradford were winning they had a lot players coming through, including Peacock and Fielden, two fo the best forwards at the time. Paul Deacon, Leon Pryce are other stars, and their system developed Robbie Paul but they had quite a few young forwards come through as well, such as langley, radford(?) and parker.

What a quality academy gives you is a pool of players to start off with. There's never enough quality out of contact to make a top team from, plus we've the salary cap to contend with now, which doesn't help.

It may not be the be all and end all, but it gives you a massive head start.