its our inability to bring in good SL players from the youth setup.

you cant say we haven't tried.... when you go through the last 10 years, we have brought alot of players through.

It just never seems to work out for that long.

Cooper, Patton, Philbin, King, Currie..... thats it really isn't it in the current side ... 3 of those are under pressure as well.... wouldn't even like to list the others.

Do we have any lined up that might make a statement this coming season? I thought Thewlis looked very promising for someone so young in the few glimpses we had of him.

Sometimes I think the club shows a lack of faith in younger players, certainly in terms of team selection.

Towards the end of last season I was sick to death of seeing the same squads, same starting 17 making the same mistakes. It was stale, unimaginative and blinkered.

Livett posesses potential but gets farmed out to HKR for months on end. Morgan Smith was told he was a hooker and then sold when it didn't work out. Luis Johnson had a stellar debut then disappears. Moran gets overlooked for Tasi. Mamo replaces Jack Johnson.

When we get an injury in the centres we stick Hughes there. Short in the pack? Stick Atkins there and now people are suggesting Burrell rather than blooding a youngster.

Maybe the lack of opportunity means when our youngsters do get first team action they are undercooked or are treated, and feel, like stopgaps.

I don’t think we have got the appetite or patience to park the monkey for 5 years, to build a G F Winning team on that basis,

We have become so frantic and frenetic and paranoid about the GF that next year has to be our year, “I want it now”

I went to the launch of the Talent Pathway at Warrington the other week. A very basic presentation and explanation of the setup, then asked all the parents to pay £40 for a Warrington shirt with a number on so they could better identify them. I was speaking to one of the coaches there and he explained they are trying to get Warrington up to the standard of the other top category sides and it's a work in progress. They said they had sessions planned for next year in the school holidays and they have a training session every now and again for players they've already identified. All very vague and distant, even for those in already identified as talented.

Meanwhile a week later, Saints had the best kids from the Warrington, Wigan and St Helens areas, plus lads from Cumbria and Leeds down at Cowley, organised into abillity levels, with the top set told they're being looked at for scholarships and to sign for them as they have the best pathway and a proven track record and would take them to Australia on tour.

Warrington seem to be doing the right things, they just need to put a rocket up it and be more aggressive about it. They've got some of the right players earmarked, but from talking to a few parents, they're likely to miss out on most of them.

To the first sentence...don't you think it's because we are so SL starved that we don't have a honeymoon period to dare blood them?
If we were perennial champions like Wigan, we'd have the nerve to lose the odd title and still have faith in the coaching staff.

No, RD I don't buy that. Bringing Livett back into the fold last season wpukdn't have been considered a risk and his form @ HKR was good. Instead we persisted with your friend Akuola and J Clark.

Sheer bloody mindedness.

The top teams are always under preasure to win but they manage that and still promote youth. Are you suggesting that we can't have an effective youth policy until the GF monkey is off our back and the preasure off? Hasn't it occurred to you that this is the exact approach iof the last 10 years that has failed and is why we are having the debate?

If its a case of lack of opportunity, how many more opportunities would Patton, Toby King, Livett, Morgan Smith, Jack Johnson have got at Wigan or Saints and which players would Wigan/Saints have moved out of the line up to make space for them?

Also while we are on this topic - would we have been better off trading for an experienced halfback when Kevin Brown went down, rather than running with Patton for the whole season?

Indeed and if we're going to have an Aussie coach then we need one who is not afraid to drop a fellow countryman. If J Clark performs this season as he did last and doesn't find himself in the reserves then we're in for another poor season in the league.

One thing is certain, youth development is the future & not just for Warrington, but for the continuing survival of the game. It may dilute the quality on the pitch at times, but perhaps there should be an agreement between clubs to give more game time at SL level to juniors.
Little Johnny will not be pleased if he does everything he can to get a team place only to find his shirt has been given to an antipodean with a name he can't pronounce ,just to get a quick fix.
Ensuring the future of the game should be more important than bringing in expensive & ,usually, end of career imports.

Doesn't seem likely. Dean looked decent on debut and Thewlis held his own. But I'd be amazed if either played next season other than during an emergency injury situation. Mamo and the new kid from Swinton will be ahead of Thewlis and Patton (or a replacement) even Jack Hughes, will get the gig ahead of him.

There seems no other obvious contenders to me (although I dont spend much time studying the U19's to be fair)

The Warrington youth system is a puzzler, I'm sure we invest money in to it. We brought Bastian over from Leeds without much success (He went on to do a brilliant job for Bradford by all accounts on a shoestring) and we recently brought over the guy from Cas who has had success there. We have the England Knights coach in charge of our U19's so we seem to be putting decent people in place. we just get zero results.

Is it the club getting in their way, trying to put structures in place that dont work? Is it just a case that Wigan & Saints have the best reputation so they automatically get the best kids going to them? We seem to have enough kids playing the game in Warrington these days at a junior level to see a better return - but we dont.

Well with you on Livett.
He was fantastic for us prior to his injury in 2018 and his untimely return at Wembley where he was ruddy awful.
I'm not sure he would be considered a development product, he is accomplished.
There has to be something in it...If there is a board eyebrow raised quietly upon Pricey's tender....it'll be Livett.
I think Moran has ordered not to pull rank on Pricey....but he must be scratching his head??

There could be something more than the antipodean preference to Jace Clark....because he simply hasn't a hair of talent Livett has.

But he wasn't fantastic, he was just in the right places to finish some tries off in a few consecutive matches.

Genuine question now, can someone, please tell me what skills livett actually brings to the first team.

Or what skills did he have in the academy when he first started getting promoted to the first team.

FMC
Are you saying being 'in the right places' to finish off a move is just luck?

Livett still has a lot to prove to me whether he will make it as a top 4 club as their starting back rower. He's miles off where the likes of Currie and Hughes were at the same age. I've always thought he's had talent - but he hasn't ever shown it consistently enough for me. Of the other 'youngsters' that have left recently I dont expect Morgan Smith to be troubling the top sides, Luis Johnson still has time and is still at the club. The best player that we have produced then let go in teh past ten years is probably Gaz O'Brien, he wasn't good enough to be our starting full back when he left, and he's not good enough to be our starting full back now.

I don't think there's a problem with the decision making over the players we let go - we make the right decisions on them..... But was their development good enough while they were here?

Am I missing something or was Wane the only one promoting kids to first team and giving them a decent go.

But as a alluded...Wigan had the umbrella of success enough to do it...
Whereas Wire are scared to death because of GF failure to take a risk.

He had a golden 6 weeks in an around the time of the Leeds away game, then got injured and lost his place.

It's not black and white like that is it, case in point, one of those tries in the leeds away game, there was a multiple person move involving ratch, daz, tyrone, hughes and livett finished it off (iirc i'll go to youtube to confirm later) livett was the last pair of hands and walked over the line as we'd stretched the eff out of leeds' defence.

I'm not going to pan a player for scoring tries, but if this conversation was, livett set up x amount of tries during that same period, i'd be more impressed.

This is where i'm at, and why i asked, he's not particularly pacey, he's not got fantastic quick hands or a great offload, he's not a line busting prop, he's not big wide ranging, he's not impactful, and he's not particularly an impressive tackler, so what is his area of expertise?

I mentioned this earlier this season, he had a great opportunity to solidify left 2nd row as his own at the start of the year, at best this season he's been as good as, ben currie who's been coming back from 2 knee surgeries and feeling his way back.

Thats nothing to get excited about.

Hasn't it occurred to you that the last 10 years at Warrington has been a big success? For those 10 years Wire have been feasting at the top table, have appeared in more major finals than anyone, have hugely advanced off the field and have attracted some of the biggest stars in world rugby! Why?....because they have the financial clout to do it! If you want to bring youngsters through all well and good and go ahead and invest some money in it but don't take your eye off the big picture! One year of failure maybe all it takes to sentence you back to your most regular position over the years.....amongst the also rans!! You really shouldn't change too much. At the moment you're the envy of an awful lot of other clubs and certainly a huge success story in a lot of peoples eyes!!

i agree with a lot of what's being said on here and in some instances both sides of the same argument.

In the case of Livett I'm a bit disappointed he's not kicked on and cemented or pushed for a starting place or at least as a regular in the 19. I think he's had chances, have they been enough though? As the other side of this argument for me is whether he'd be better value than Jason Clark and deserved to start, pushing Clark to up his game or ship out.

He's almost certainly better value and if there's no loss in performance then Price should manage that and either replace Clark and keep Livett freeing up some cap for other areas...a top prop or two whilst searching for better options at Loose/SR

Excellent point Al but it is in the nature of fans to look up ie at those who have finished above rather than down

I have a similar view on Livett.

I think with young players you need to have a decent sample size of games to judge them over, rather than the impression of their first 4 to 5 appearances. This works both ways. You can't write a player off too early and need to give them a decent run of games to see what they can do, but also you need to guard against overhype early on.

What I think happens quite often with young players is they come in to a team in a positive situation (eg being introduced from the bench in a relatively easy match up/ when the team is winning), other teams don't have film on them at this time and so they can have a bit of a grace period until they start having to face defences that have explicitly prepared for them. Mix this with a bit of optimism bias from fans who always hope they have found the next 'big thing' and people extrapolate some bright signs in early appearances in to a prediction of a golden future. Over a longer time frame the player's true ability is revealed, but sometimes when it didn't live up to the early hype people look for explanations like 'the coaching staff ruined them' and so on.

We've had a number of players who suffered from excess expectations because they've been overhyped when they first broke in to the team: Jon Roper, Steve Pickersgill, Kevin Penny, Rhys Evans. Then as time has gone on their limitations were exposed and they didn't live up to it. None of them went to other clubs and stepped up a level - they just looked like the same limited players elsewhere.

I think the basic problem if you compare us to Wigan/Saints is that we haven't brought through the talent in the first place. We've pushed a lot of mediocre players in to the first team, given them their 30 to 40 games and then they just move on.

The issue isn't that talent is unable to succeed at Warrington in a first team environment. We have sometimes taken genuine talent that has been brought through other clubs' youth systems but not established themselves in the first team, and with us that talent has flourished: Lee Briers, Ben Westwood, Simon Grix, Chris Bridge. Now had those guys been on our rosters as juniors, we would have been listing them like Harris and Sculthorpe as examples of big wins for our Academy. Briers and Bridge would not have been given the same opportunities to develop had they stayed at their former clubs rather than joining us.

So for me the issue isn't patience in the first team or giving opportunities to develop, it's that the level of actual talent emerging from our Academy has been well down compared to our SL peers, for a LONG TIME. I can understand being behind Wigan/Leeds/Saints, but we've also been behind Hull, Cas and Wakey in this regard as well, and for all the big PR talk that has come out of the club for decades about youth development it has been a weakness.

Well said ,Sally !

I have no inside knowledge, so from an outsider point of view my impression is that the club has realised the lack of talent development has been a major issue for many years. What seems to happen though is that there follows major reorganisation after reorganisation. This results in a lack of stability and that no doubt influences parents/players when deciding where to go.
If as a parent my child was offered the opportunity of joining a club with a demonstrable history of developing young players to international level on a regular basis against one that hasn’t but is offering a few extra £ I know which I would favour.
This is part of the problem Wire face.