Another point is.... How many times do you reckon we get a bit of a roll on or catch a kick on the full, only for Charnley to take the next drive and rather than hit the floor and keep the momentum going he rolls around on the floor looking for a penalty....

Just get up and play it ffs. The opposition is on the back foot struggling to make the 10 meters and he's balling about looking for a pen or back to 6. Really starting to grind my gears.

This gets said a lot but I don't see any real evidence that it's related to whether a player came from the academy.

During my time as a Wire fan we've generally been behind Wigan, Leeds, Saints in terms of the share of regular first teamers that came through our own academy, but there were two periods where we did have a lot of Academy products in the team.

One was in the earlier Cullen era where we had Hilton, Paul Wood, Stevens, Noone, Wainwright, Sibbitt, Mark Gleeson, Hulse and then he introduced Pickersgill and Riley.

The second was in the later TS era where we had Cooper, Currie, Evans, O'Brien, Ormsby, Penny, Patton, Livett, King, Philbin, Dwyer.

Some of these players were good, some were ordinary, some would obviously run into the ground for the shirt, others were just run of the mill in terms of attitude. But I don't remember thinking in these eras that these guys were noticeably better than the players around them or noticeably more committed.

I think there is an important point around doing due diligence when you sign a big star, either from the NRL or SL. I remember reading something about Sir Alex Ferguson's approach to recruitment, that he never followed a 'galactico' approach and the one obvious time he did (Juan Sebastian Veron) didn't work out. He liked to sign players on the way up who had the hunger to win things, rather than players who had already won a lot and were mentally in a position where they could have coasted.

Sometimes Wire have been in a position where we have signed players who had won SL or NRL Grand Finals, and we thought it was great we are getting someone with 'winning experience' but they probably looked at Warrington and thought we're probably not going to win a GF, it's more about securing a good contract (maybe the last big contract they will get in their careers). With some recent NRL signings I've wondered whether we were really just signing players who were out of contract, couldn't get what they wanted from an NRL club and their agent wanted to park them in SL for a year or two on a good deal, hoping a club with a vacancy in their position would have more cap space a couple of years down the line.

Some big stars have great attitudes and bring that wherever they go. Jamie Peacock won everything at Bradford, went to Leeds and wanted to achieve more. We had that with Adrian Morley, Brett Hodgson. In the NRL you get a certain type of Aussie competitor personality, who even if they aren't a big name, will identify with the team they are in and buy in: Greg Mackey, Nat Wood, Chris Hicks. These are well worth finding.

I think we need to do a lot more due diligence into the attitudes of players that we target and not just get hoodwinked into agents' marketing, but I don't think this is an issue about whether players come from the Academy or not. If we had an Academy that produced better talent (better than those players listed above) then in a salary-cap constrained league its an advantage because we'd always have a pool of low-cost young players to bring into the squad, and even when they get future contracts, its easier to keep a unit together like Leeds did, where most of those individuals were paid less than they could have done had they gone to other clubs (inevitably the odd one will leave like Calderwood did). Although if you do produce world class stars like Harris and Scully you can't expect to keep them on the cheap in a team that's not competing at the top, just because they came through the Academy.

When you play a side like Wigan the homegrown players, particularly from Warrington, will see it as a must win game. The imports, particularly from abroad will simply see it as another match. So if we can get the quality we need through the Academy, you are immediately handed a major advantage in terms of both attitude and effort. The problem of course is that over the past 10 years or so we have seen rugby league dribbling away as a sport of choice for UK kids, so the quality is not there and we are forced to buy it in. That's expensive, a short lived fix, and unsustainable for most clubs. Add in the duds like Asotasi, or the couldn't be bothered to get fit, or the homesick who stay for a year, or the guys who like other botanical products, or the olympic ice skaters that "always wanted to try RL" etc and it becomes a very hit and miss game.

So when do you define the start of the 'Moran era'?
Do you mean when he first became a director in 1998 or when he took ownership in 2004?

Before he became a director in 1998 we were the club that was selling off our Academy products Harris, Sculthorpe), and chasing signings like Andy Currier, Martin Dermott, Mike Ford, Richie Eyers, Paul Hulme. I'm not sure this was a particularly long-term mentality.

In the years between 1998 and 2004, we were a club who went for ageing internationals: Allan Hunte, Allan Langer, Andrew Gee, Tawera Nikau, Kevin Walters and ageing not-internationals Steve Georgallis, Paul Marquet, Matt Rodwell.

After Simon Moran took ownership, the recruitment policy stepped up a notch. Instead of it being just players winding down their careers wanted we started targeting top players who were still in their prime: Gleeson, Morley, Hodgson, King, the Monaghans, and also started signing young talent from other clubs' academies: Bridge, Grix, Harrison. I don't remember anybody ever saying that these guys were not putting the effort in because they had come from other clubs academies rather than our own.

Also in the Cullen and later TS era there were a lot of young home grown players given their chance. In my view, some of them got a lot more chances with us than they would have done, had they been at one of the top clubs, and you can use the lefty critique about us being too nice, with the number of first team games that guys like Evans and Patton got with us.

If you compare our record at winning trophies and making finals in the years since Simon Moran has been owner it is on a different scale to what it has been before.

So I don't think its fair to say that this is a problem that is related to Simon Moran's involvement.

For me the two relevant problems here are:

a) We lag behind the top clubs in producing [ireal talent[/i in the Academy. We've churned out a lot of so-so SL standard players and been willing to give them chances, but only Wood, Cooper, Currie and Riley really worthy of being in a title-challenging team.

b) The recruitment of outside players improved from 2004 to 2013 but has gone backwards since. Recruitment has become harder for all clubs as the market from the NRL has tightened and there's real scarcity of props and halfbacks but some other clubs (Wigan, Cas, Salford) have been notably better than us at finding underrated gems. Wigan in particular signed a number of players that we scoffed at like Blake Green, Matty Smith, but then went on to win Grand Finals. The quality of recruitment also seemed to decline after Andy Gatcliffe left.

I think there is a real danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water. This season isn’t over yet, why are people talking like it is? Where is that desire to win?
I enjoyed the game on Friday as a contest between 2 very committed teams. We were dominant in the first half and didn’t get the rewards that the effort deserved but it was fine margins between scoring and not, some days you hold the ball sometimes you lose it (or it gets dislodged). Wigan showed on 2 clear occasions that they were prepared to risk everything to prevent a try (I’m still unclear why the second didn’t warrant yellow) but this isn’t a rant about refs.
Of course I was disappointed by the result and the efforts of our halfbacks in particular, Widdop was a real curates egg, Austin MIA.
The reality is that our squad is fixed for this season and at this late stage so is our coach.
So my answer to the question is “ we don’t go anywhere”. Price is aware as the rest of us that to keep his job and any future r3turn to the NRL he needs to win big. There is still a chance to do it. The squad for Tuesday shows changes that I had hoped to see (maybe not Akouala), buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.


(Personally I would be casting out feelers for a new coach if I was in charge, just in case.)

“where do we go from here.”



Well, I for one am going to get that haircut, got to stay one haircut in front these days.

Wherever we go, let’s not go to the same place we went last time we were wondering where do we go from here