In the reserves or Ladies team?

The plan at the start of the year was that he should be a back up half-back. You really can't really expect the club to have a world class half-back as a back up.
Are you suggesting that in a "public forum" you can insult anyone ... for ever and ever and ever. If I was to suggest you are "mindless" you would quite rightly be upset ... so I won't. I'm sure you mean well but I think it has already been mentioned on this forum about Patton.

No, it wouldn't upset me in the slightest because it's an open forum for actual opinion. I wouldn't visit any website if it 'upset' me - anybody who gets upset by words on any website really need to stay away from the internet and probably see a doctor about their own issues...

there was a NOT missing!!

I reckon if you ever played, reffed or coached a team you would have a little more sympathy for the players. But maybe you haven't.

If you are going to be a pro-sportsman or sportswoman in front of an audience you need to take the accolades and the critique. If you go on a public forum expect to read posts you disagree with.

No-one is making personal attacks or slurs against a players character, just commenting on ability. I would hope that 100% of the people on here would wish the player well in life.

This is the most sensible way to see Patton.

He is the back up, and he had to play the full season due to unexpected circumstances. When this happens all you can expect is that he does the best that he can. Occasionally there will be a heroic story where the back up turns out to be an undiscovered gem but more often than not this won't happen.

Now you can rant all season and say Patton should not be a first choice starter...well yeah, he wouldn't have been if Brown had been fit.

I think a lot of the aggro against Patton has been provoked by rubber duckie's excessive hyperbole about Patton being some kind of rare generational talent, so there's a backlash on here. It's not Patton who has been going round telling everyone he is this great, its rubber duckie. So really it's rubber duckie's ability to evaluate players that should be in the dock more than Patton.

If it wasn't for that, there wouldn't have been the same angry debate here, most of us would probably have thought, yeah its not ideal that we have to run with Patton this year, next year when Widdop arrives Patton will be understudy to Austin/Widdop and can cover at hooker as well - which isn't a bad situation for us and it's not a bad role for him either. It's the role Nat Wood used to have at Sydney Roosters as the third halfback behind Adrian Lam and Brad Fittler.

My rationale for not expecting us to win a Grand Final in the next 10 years is more based on the lack of rationale for expecting us to win one.

Look over a long period of time and you see the Grand Finals every year are won by one of three teams: Leeds, Saints and Wigan. Bradford broke in to that three times between 2001 and 2005 but since they fell off a cliff no other club has done it. Wire, Hull, Castleford have had their moments but not been able to break in.

Those three clubs are ahead of the rest in terms of their general set up, recruitment, ability to bring young players through their academies who can spend a decade in their team as elite players, ability to get the right coaches. All three of those clubs have had down periods but they always recover before other clubs break in.

So to expect us, or anyone else, Cas, Hull etc, to break in and win a Grand Final you'd need to see evidence that they have reached the levels of those clubs. Nobody has.

The clubs outside that clique will have lots of debate focused on the coach, is Price/Radford/Powell the man or do we need to fire the coach to take us to the next level, but it misses the point and overrates the importance of the coach. Tony Smith, Brian McDermott, Ian Millward, Brian Noble all won multiple GFs inside those club set ups. They have all coached at other clubs too, but the GFs don't follow them when they leave.

Have you been smelling something?
So RD is the catalyst for a linching frenzy!
How do you equate the vile abuse DP receives on bacefook?...no RD to stimulate them there?

Interesting SC, but the fact is that despite the failings of our youth policy we [ishould[/i have broken into the GF winning club in the last six years.

Our failure to do so wasn't down to the lack of young players coming through it was an inability to rise to the occasion, in the way we had done several times at Wembley.

I think if you put together the money we can draw on as a club with the right coach we would win the GF multiple times. The history, for me at least, has nothing to do with what can be achieved going forward.

Fair point, in 2013 in particular it was due to bad luck really, had we not lost Monaghan and Ratchford through injury we would have likely won that game. So yes, we did get close back then, and my analysis about not expecting us to win the Grand Final in the next 10 years is incomplete if I'm just talking about not bringing through those generational talent young players who can form heart of a squad for a long period of time. You could then say that we either have to bring them through ourselves or recruit that calibre of player, on contracts that will mean they stay for at least 4 to 5 years - which we did with the likes of Morley, the Monaghans, Hodgson, Briers, Westwood. The problem now is the absence of that calibre of player or that kind of leader, we would need to see at least 5 or 6 of that kind of player to have a shot at winning the Grand Final.

Indeed, no disputing that. I agree, bar a one off fluke I don't see us being [iregular[/i GF attendees let alone winners for some time.

Part 2 of this interview has just dropped on the guardian https://www.warringtonguardian.co.uk/sp ... will-rise/ I don't know if it's just me but I couldn't care less about the game day experience when the team are dishing up the dirge they have this season. I pay to watch a good standard of rugby not a bloke in a green morph suit legging it the length of the field.

Part 2 of this interview has just dropped on the guardian https://www.warringtonguardian.co.uk/sp ... will-rise/ I don't know if it's just me but I couldn't care less about the game day experience when the team are dishing up the dirge they have this season. I pay to watch a good standard of rugby not a bloke in a green morph suit legging it the length of the field.

Quote ="BIAW!"Part 2 of this interview has just dropped on the guardian https://www.warringtonguardian.co.uk/sp ... will-rise/ I don't know if it's just me but I couldn't care less about the game day experience when the team are dishing up the dirge they have this season. I pay to watch a good standard of rugby not a bloke in a green morph suit legging it the length of the field.'" Whilst I do agree with you, I'm sure it makes it a more interesting day for younger fans and families. Fair play to the club for trying to enhance the experience. Really though it's the team that gets the punters through the gates in the first place. I think they're looking at superleague there a bit too much but once again he's talked about more expansive rugby. I'll believe it when I see it.

Quote ="BIAW!"Part 2 of this interview has just dropped on the guardian https://www.warringtonguardian.co.uk/sp ... will-rise/ I don't know if it's just me but I couldn't care less about the game day experience when the team are dishing up the dirge they have this season. I pay to watch a good standard of rugby not a bloke in a green morph suit legging it the length of the field.'" Whilst I do agree with you, I'm sure it makes it a more interesting day for younger fans and families. Fair play to the club for trying to enhance the experience. Really though it's the team that gets the punters through the gates in the first place. I think they're looking at superleague there a bit too much but once again he's talked about more expansive rugby. I'll believe it when I see it.

Quote ="BIAW!"Part 2 of this interview has just dropped on the guardian https://www.warringtonguardian.co.uk/sp ... will-rise/ I don't know if it's just me but I couldn't care less about the game day experience when the team are dishing up the dirge they have this season. I pay to watch a good standard of rugby not a bloke in a green morph suit legging it the length of the field.'" Exactly, but i'm surprised we don't flatter our competition sponsors by calling him the flying mushy pea. It is the quality of play from week to week that sells season tickets & the game in general ,finals are for the very few.

Quote ="BIAW!"Part 2 of this interview has just dropped on the guardian https://www.warringtonguardian.co.uk/sp ... will-rise/ I don't know if it's just me but I couldn't care less about the game day experience when the team are dishing up the dirge they have this season. I pay to watch a good standard of rugby not a bloke in a green morph suit legging it the length of the field.'" Exactly, but i'm surprised we don't flatter our competition sponsors by calling him the flying mushy pea. It is the quality of play from week to week that sells season tickets & the game in general ,finals are for the very few.

I don’t understand why you doubt he wants more expansive rugby? The brand of rugby by the end was the very antithesis of that and we looked like we couldn’t score in a brothel. I’ve said before it looked like we were playing on a pitch half as wide as the opposition were.

I wonder why he has waited until the end of the season to talk about the turgid rugby. He could have raised it 4 months ago. Like Sally said lets see if this is real intent or just words to sell season tickets.

I agree, it is fair play to the club for doing this but at the moment it feels we see more about social media and game day experience than what we are doing on the pitch, the game day and social media should be a by product of what we achieve on the field, at the moment it feels the other way round.

Not that surprising, if he had said anything at that time it would’ve been extremely undermining and an invitation to any malcontents in the squad to stir things up. The coach now has the off season to develop the style of play the club want or face the consequences. KF isn’t stupid he knows that interview makes him a hostage to fortune. More than that it’s saying to Price perform or else.

I don't doubt that he wants it, my doubt is on expansive rugby being delivered under the current coach.

This is completely right. Unfortunately these days you see it in a lot of fields of work, there's a generation of managers who have studied intensely theory about branding and marketing and end up not seeing the wood for the trees. Their hallmark is usually exaggerated slogans that become a parody of themselves. I saw a presentation from a company a few weeks back that said their vision was to provide the ultimate coffee experience for the modern dynamic company. They sell coffee machines. I'm sure many people on here have worked with cringey managers who take themselves too seriously on team 'away days' or whatever and like to talk about 'what's our team vision', 'what story do we have to tell'.

Sometimes you just have to step back from all that. The gameday experience is massively important, but you can come away from all the different gameday gimmicks and slogans like 'memories are made here' and instead follow 2 principles. Do the simple things well (quality of entertainment on the pitch, quality/price/availability of food and drink at the ground), and create an air of class. Gimmicks work against creating an air of class. I went to the Emirates a few times a few years ago, and even though Arsenal weren't the top team there was just an aura about everything in the stadium, and the way they did everything, how elegant and refined it was, that this was a club that rung of class, without appearing to try too hard.

The problem with some of the marketing types is that they are so convinced in their own theory of what people want, that they respond to any declining customer figures by saying they haven't gone far enough. I bet at the club right now there are a load of meetings going on and powerpoint presentations being created with people saying things like how do we make sure we have more wacky wire flyer type ideas, to make sure that next year when we make the playoffs we pack out the HJ, and missing some of the obvious basics.

I also think this reflects the shift in approach since Andy Gatcliffe left. The club was more understated in the Gatcliffe era, but it quietly focused on the things that matters.

Fitzpatrick's 'orchestra pit' nonsense tells you all you need to know about how classy we intend to be.

Ah yes, Fitzpatrick quoting Roger Ailes, the father of the "alt-right" media who got forced out of Fox news because of sexual harassment allegations. If one man says he can create peace in the middle east and another falls in the orchestra pit, its the man in the orchestra pit who features in the lead story in the news, so you want to be that man not the one who solves conflict.

It seems to be in vogue these days to quote these alt-righters as some kind of strategic geniuses who have the key to understanding the 'man on the street', Roger Ailes, Steve Bannon, Lynton Crosby. Look for conflict and controversy and that creates headlines. Especially in the social media era.

Fitzpatrick was trying this orchestra pit stuff earlier in the season, saying we should be talking up rivalries and conflict, it gets people talking about the club, generates social media headlines. When we upset Hull and Lee Radford had a go at us after they beat us, Fitzpatrick probably chalked that kind of thing down as a win, because it generated publicity, got the club being talked about in social media.

Problem is, it's a dangerous game delving in to the alt-right playbook because you don't know what you might unleash. Later in the season we had that Wire fan tweeting that a ref should be shot dead live on TV, that got the club talked about a lot on the internet too, generated tweets that had 'Warrington Wolves' involved, everyone got to see what club that guy supported. Publicity for us.

Maybe that's not what Fitzpatrick meant when he wanted to stir up rivalries and a bit of controversy but from the Ailes/alt right playbook that's exactly the kind of thing you want. It upsets the PC brigade but there's a chunk of the fanbase who would have read that tweet and loved it, thought it was funny/edgy. Ailes would have approved.

You could do better than the orchestra pit, just announce that we are renaming one of the stands the Donald Trump stand. This will get us massive worldwide publicity. The news will reach the great man himself and he will be only too happy to provide us with a free retweet or give a line at one of his press conferences.

"The people in Britain, in Warrington, they love me over there. It's a great club, great people they really love me, and I think they're creating something really special over there, real smart people"

You forgot "a club that is really going places, they really are"