Taking nothing away from a decently drilled Wigan but this is symbolic of years of under performance by our once great club

KC - out if depth . Roby in bench? My ass
Rush - what value does he add?

Cheap coach and and CEO based on years of cheap recruitment means mid table this year and potential middle 8s or worse to come.

Eamon - please make changes and save our future

Off for a lie down....

What's Wellens done wrong?

Being neutral here, i don't see how looking at your squad how you have gone from the likes of Long, Sculthorpe, Newlove, Gidley, Joynt, Lyon etc to the squad you have now. How did you get so many top class players in a salary capped sport? Im not suggesting you cheated the system. How can you have such quality to one that is no where near that standard? I know you have had a stadium to pay for, however you have been at full salary cap the whole time? You must have players who are taking large spaces of salary cap who are not worth that amount? I think you'd agree with that and not trying to put a dig in. That being said, i believe you will probably win tonight. We are not the same team without Sandow. We need his X-Factor to break teams open, we will be like we were last season without him, good at going forward but not able to open up defences.

Have you watched Saints on tv much this year, you would disagree with yourself if you had.
Saints had all that quality of player you named 10 years ago however the salary cap hasn't changed (money wise) since that time. A host of bad bad recruitment decisions, poor coaches enforcing dull rugby (just do our best mentality) have since followed. Wire on the other hand have recruited really well. Likening Wires current side to what happened with saints, if Sandow goes back to NRL, Gidley retires and Currie is also hoovered up by NRL as you have eluded to with Sandow it's a whole different story.
SL is a poor comp now with the salary cap frozen & the better players going elsewhere (not always for money I agree ) then it's not looking like it's getting better anytime soon

There are plenty of reasons. Firstly, there's inflation to take into account. Had the salary cap been adjusted for inflation since it had come in it would be up around £3m now. So, in real terms, we had up to a third more money to spend back then. There were also tax loopholes that clubs were allowed to exploit in paying their players - something to do with image rights. That got closed up in 2009, and was, I think, the main reason why a few clubs like Bradford, London and Wakey nearly went belly up not long after, as they suddenly got landed with hefty back-dated bills from the HMRC. Then there's the fact that union and the NRL were nowhere near as financially powerful when we had all of those players, so we were able to keep hold of them once we'd got them. There's just no way we or anyone else could assemble a similar lineup in the current climate.

That's not to make an excuse for our club's poor recruitment over the last decade, though. When we lost Graham and Eastmond (two young players the club would have built a side around) we replaced them with totally unsuitable big money signings, and, apart from the odd gem like Walmsley and the odd good solid recruit like Amor, we've been shopping at Primark since then. Clubs like Warrington and Hull have shown recently that it's still possible to sign good quality players if you stick your neck out.

I wish I shared your thoughts about tonight's game. I think we might suprise you with how bad we are.

Good post mate. The salary cap is an issue, across the board not just at Saints. My opinion on this as admittedly only recently changed but they have to put the cap up. It's not fair on the fans. We pay more to watch the games than we did over 10 years ago yet the product is much poorer.