Who said anything about replacing Smith ? Players have weaknesses or develop bad habits and coaches are there to straighten them out. Smith (unless he believes he is god) will realise he too makes mistakes. We learn from our mistakes, correct them, and move on. I am sure TS, with some 'friendly encouragement' from uncle Simon, is analysing his decisions and correcting errors. But this year has already gone, barring some Wigan-esque luck in the CC of course.

For me, I won't make a decision on Smith on the performance of the team for a long while yet. Well into next season for me.

But in the last few years his, and his board/management team's, player loss and recruitment has been poor for me. We've lost King, Anderson, Solomona, Morley, Carvell, Cooper, Briers, Hodgson and moved Atkins (in from a left edge of Atkins-King-Anderson) and have seen huge injury problems with MMonaghan, Bridge and Harrison especially.

What we've been left with is an inferior team. There have been individual successes (Chris Hill for example; excellent!) but the whole product is inferior. Which tells me that the board/Smith haven't been serious about making this club a genuine top club. We've needed to [ipush on[/i from this good little spell of three Challenge Cup wins and a few Grand Final appearances, not regress.

But there could be a longer term plan for all this than what we're looking at in the short term. Maybe this year will see many younger and lesser squad members from years past learn how to become leaders and better players while we then go on and recruit better in the coming years. Leaving us in a position come two years time where we'll be a serious club ready to take on the lot. Who knows...

Unless - and this is something someone else has said to me - that Moran's money was put in for that particular team we've just seen over the last few years. The recruitment drive then Smith's appointment and the further recruitment drive was done in the expectation that we would go and win a few Grand Finals, Challenge Cups and even World Club Challenges. Maybe what we've seen has been an underachievement from what was expected and now the money is going to be going in in less amounts and fewer recruitment drives. It would make sense from what we've seen. We're well below the Salary Cap, we're well below the overseas quota, we've let a lot of big bucks players go and we're not as good as we have been over the previous five years.

The one thing Tony Smith deserves, with his achievements at Wire, is plenty of breathing space from the fans at times like this - He also deserves to be able to decide his own future at this present time and should not be under any pressure from those up above, or on the terraces, over his job.

BUT, like I said earlier, the one thing that we all wouldn't want to happen (Smith, the Board, the fans), is for things to go stale - Its been five years, things have mainly been fantastic, but it would be unrealistic to think that he could keep that going. Inevitably, we are/were going to hit a sticky patch, not just the odd 2 or 3 match bad spell, but a bad season.

Smith does deserve the chance to rectify things, but I would like to think that he would not cling on to the job in a Paul Cullen style, where everybody could see that things needed changing, but nobody had the bottle to do anything about it, until it was about 2 years too late.

Ultimately, we are going to have take this season on the chin - Let's judge TS in 12 months time, after he has had chance to really wield the axe, and then we can really see if this downturn in fortunes is just a temporary one.

There is not going to be much wielding of the axe. Look at the squad list from here: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=565030&tsmp=1397318001 The players out of contract at the end of this season are: M Monaghan, Waterhouse, Dwyer, Laithwaite, Penny, B Evans, D Bridge, Shaw, Burke, Ormsby. Of these only Monaghan and Waterhouse are likely to be on significant salaries so that really means we can bring in about two established players. The squad next season is going to be more or less the same as it is now.

There is not going to be much wielding of the axe. Look at the squad list from here: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=565030&tsmp=1397318001 The players out of contract at the end of this season are: M Monaghan, Waterhouse, Dwyer, Laithwaite, Penny, B Evans, D Bridge, Shaw, Burke, Ormsby. Of these only Monaghan and Waterhouse are likely to be on significant salaries so that really means we can bring in about two established players. The squad next season is going to be more or less the same as it is now.

Quote ="sally cinnamon"There is not going to be much wielding of the axe. Look at the squad list from here: viewtopic.php? ... 1397318001 The players out of contract at the end of this season are: M Monaghan, Waterhouse, Dwyer, Laithwaite, Penny, B Evans, D Bridge, Shaw, Burke, Ormsby. Of these only Monaghan and Waterhouse are likely to be on significant salaries so that really means we can bring in about two established players. The squad next season is going to be more or less the same as it is now.'" Isn't that assuming your up to the cap this year?

Quote ="sally cinnamon"There is not going to be much wielding of the axe. Look at the squad list from here: viewtopic.php? ... 1397318001 The players out of contract at the end of this season are: M Monaghan, Waterhouse, Dwyer, Laithwaite, Penny, B Evans, D Bridge, Shaw, Burke, Ormsby. Of these only Monaghan and Waterhouse are likely to be on significant salaries so that really means we can bring in about two established players. The squad next season is going to be more or less the same as it is now.'" Isn't that assuming your up to the cap this year?

Thats a fair point we did lose four players that were likely to be large earners this year and only brought one in. However that space could have been eaten up by existing players getting contract upgrades: we do have a few that signed new longish term contracts so this might have been on better terms.

I heard Tony Smith once on the radio before the season kicked off say that there was room in our cap for a signing.

Wouldn't surprise me to see 3 senior players brought in next year (depending on who you release) - aka you guys are are running a player under this year.

The problem is which players are options to bring in...

Out; Briers, Morley, Hodgson, Carvell, Cooper, Blythe, Tyke

We know Carvell was on £135k/yr, so those first four were probably about £600k of cap

In;
Asotasi, Russel, England, Penny

Penny was peanuts (15,k) and the other two were not established SL standard, so probably less than Cooper and Blythe.


So excluding salary upgrades, there was probably a fall of around £450-500K in our salary cap last year.

out. you forgot solamona

£385 under this year!

.000

Pre season I spoke with Brian Carney about this...he reckons were 400k under cap.

There are some considered and thoughtful opinions being expressed, eventually, and it's interesting to see how varied they are.

There's no way we as fans can say with certainty what should and shouldn't have happened with regards to recruitment because we aren't in possession of the full facts. I'm surprised and disappointed by some of the ins and outs, but I fully expect there are valid reasons for each one that we don't know about.

All this talk about replacements is well and good but we are only eight games into the season and there's an awful long way to go. The focus should be how to get the best out of the current squad.

And that's my main concern!

Two of the main accusations from fans are a lack of pace and poor cohesion in attack.
So to see recent comments that training sessions don't really focus on these aspects got me wondering.
What do they do?
As a fan I'd be really interested to see a timetable of the average training week.
It can't all be weights, aerobic and wrestling (and Twitter and Nando's) can it?
If anyone reads this with first hand knowledge would be kind enough to offer a glimpse of a typical schedule I for one would be very grateful.

By the way, this isn't questioning the efforts and commitment of the coaching staff and players, I'd genuinely like to know what they are doing instead of speed work and formulating attacking structures. (There's nothing wrong with attacking structure, ask any Wigan fan!)

I thought it would be nice to finish on a positive or two.
In 2009 we were next to bottom after Round 9 with only two wins. So things can turn around quickly; form is a fickle commodity. After all, we finished that season at the heady heights of tenth place(!) - but with the Challenge Cup in our possession.
Also, Myler and Ratchford were our starting half backs in 11 league games last year and won 8 of them scoring an average of 30 points per game.

I might be wrong, but I'm still fairly confident that this season will end up OK.

Having witnessed a Captain's run at the H&J, I can confirm we do practice attacking plays.

Without wanting to be too much of a knob, what could we have done around recruitment to make this better? We've had Myler and Ratchford here for a few years looking like strong players, we had O'Brien out on loan progressing and we had Briers here, looking like an evergreen. Injury forced Briers to retire after the season (could Smith have planned for that?), I imagine most halfbacks available were already signed (Walsh) and we surely couldn't have kept another halfback on the books during previous years as I imagine we were right at the cap.

I believe Smith's biggest mistake has been how fast everything happened. Morley, Carvs, Cooper and Hodgson, all in one Winter, whilst Briers also retired. If he felt the likes of BEvans, Laithwaite and Riley were ready to replace them, they should have been proving it by playing regularly for us last year, rather than spending time out on loan and coming to the club almost as new players.

I've 100% belief that Smith can rectify the situation. I think the majority of his signings have been good and made with the right intent. Ratch was clearly meant to play full back this year behind Briers and Myler, which would have worked, with him slipping in at 6 when Lee was resting, with Russell coming in.

As most have said, we might as well forget this season. We're just not equipped to compete.

I've said it before and I'll reiterate - the loss of Briers was unexpected, but we could have recruited overseas in plenty of time. The club is not short of contacts down-under, and to be honest there are half-backs playing reserve grade in Australia who would show our half-backs a thing or two.

The problem was either over-confidence, or over-estimating certain players abilities or ability to take on responsibility. As for the loss of experience, it would appear that both Carvell & Hodgson were virtually shown the door by the club - if we'd been concerned about losing so much experience in so short a time, we could have done something about it and re-negotiated with them.

As for this season, yes it appears to be a write-off, but lets not insult the intelligence of the paying punter by telling them that what is being served up the by team at the moment is part of some grand plan, that we are progressing and not far away.

Stand up and take a bow that man.
I applaud you.

I think for me, what somebody should have done was a 'risk assessment'. Looking back to last year we had Briers (35), Morley (36), Hodgson (35), Monas (33), and Waterhouse, Westwood and Carvell all 32 yrs of age. Its all right to have hindsight, but someone should have said that having 6 key members of the team between 32 and 36 was a big risk because we had no idea how quickly their performance would deteriorate or if injury would curtail their career. The danger was losing half the team very quickly - too quickly to replace them with equivalent quality and so maintain our top 4 position. So we should probably have been looking for high quality replacements back in 2012, and when an opportunity arose, bought in - regardless of which player we replaced. After all, we did keep extending the contracts of most of the above players, so the opportunity was probably there.

What's the biggest mystery, is that of those seven players you name, the one you would have had out of the door first was Michael Monaghan, yet he was the only one actually given a fresh contract - He has been crocked for 2 years now, he wouldn't pass a standard medical, never mind one for a rigorous sport like RL.

The truth is, we gave a guy a new contract simply to keep his brother at the club - We should not have done this and if Joel didn't want to stay on his own, then he should have been shown the door too.

I don't think that releasing Morley and Carvell was particularly a mistake, but while Michael Monaghan is still at our club, while they are still playing the game for other clubs, shows massive misjudgement on Tony Smith's part.

Jesus Yed, what are you trying to cause here by starting threads like this?

I saw that Tony was getting quite a few comments on threads so I realised it would be a good topic.

My OP wasn't in any way reflecting my own opinion.

I'd like to know what TS has them doing in the week, because last night, the Wigan and Saints games they looked like they had drove home after the previous match and just met up before the next match.

This. A player of the calibre and importance of briers is almost irreplaceable especially at short notice. I think ratchford was signed as a replacement for either briers or Hodgson but I am not sure TS knew which yet and another season may/ may not have brought the answer.

I think carvell being released is a big error, I still don't understand that one.

All that said its difficult to understand how professional rugby league players could so spectacularly forget how to get the basics right it is surely not beyond any of our players to play basic rugby. I still think we will gel ang get better but 9 games in to the season without a good performance to show for it is as frustrating as it is baffling.

Come on wire sort it out.