Agreed

We took grix from wire, he never played for us. Not sure why he came but he was injured and was never going to play.
Did he go back to wire the season after.
M

He's more likely to get a pass and seems to be having a good run of injury free games.
Even at Wakefield he got a lot of tries on his own so as you say its not like they've improved him, just he has more opportunity.

Wire needed the cap space to sign Chris Sandow. We took Grix as a favour hoping they'd help us out further down the line. I'm not sure they ever did.

Definitely about the service. TJ is still my favourite superleague player. He is a Trinity success story. I hope to see a few more like him come from the academy.

In my opinion Batchelor has come on leaps and bounds.

Let's slightly tweak the question.... are we weaker for not having batch in our team?

If he can hold his Ale he’ll be fine with us

Of course we are. He's a good player. I don't think anyone would argue with that. But Scarlet suggested he'd be better at Rovers just by being there and not here, and I haven't seen that.

And if he had signed for saints or Wigan he probably would be still further on in his development, surrounded by better players , better set up and a better culture .

He's definitely not a 'party' boy.

Good luck to Jordan, it’s a short career, with a young family etc you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to provide. Isn’t that the same as any job. No one can ever question he gave his all for the club

Batchelor has always been very good and should have been our captain imho. There were I’m told reasons he left.

Are we weaker is a different question all together than if Batchelor has improved since leaving.

Imo we are weaker certainly even more so when the current second rowers like Pitts, Ashurst, eventually Griffin retire etc. it’s the fact we have nobody at second row for the future/long term.

HKR have just extended his contract by a couple of years which is a good indication of his quality and how important they see him as part of their future

You would think bringing through some young players of their own would be an important part of their future.

Or us not renewing their contracts allowing them to join other clubs.

We offered Batch a contract as well you know.

Did Carter not say that he hadn’t spoken to any of the players coming out of contract so didn’t know what they were doing.

When we offer them a contract.....they can negotiate elsewhere. So if Batch doesn't come back with an answer, Carter doesn't know what he's doing.

We've talked about this a lot in the past. I don't know why you are trying to make something of it.

Batch said the year before he was looking and we got him to extend for one more year, so it was only a matter of time.

We actually had from him resigning to the 01/05/2022 to get an agreement but obviously chose not to and his agent may have been one of those who did not get on with him.
It’s sadly too late now because we will never see him or TJ in the Wakefield shirt with the possible exception of a testimonial game.

I’d think that bringing through young players would be an important part of our future, unfortunately we obviously don’t because we expect them to accept poor contracts because they’re home grown and risk losing them to the likes of HKR

Do you read the same words as me?
Agreement means both parties need to agree. Batch didn't.

Maybe we could have offered more I don't know but both coach and CEO are on record saying we wanted him to stay.

And yes I think the agent is the one he fell out with.

Wakefield have developed plenty of lads throughout the SL era and have unfortunately lost some to lazier clubs with bigger cheque books. Was Shudds in the early days, now its Rovers who choose to buy-in a squad.

Maybe things will change when the money man finally arrives. It would be nice to both develop and retain.

Absolutely correct, we do leave ourselves vulnerable because we have a history of paying Youth products the barest of minimums until forced to do otherwise and sometimes it’s too late

Indeed, it seems a bizarre policy after spending so much time and effort into getting them to a stage where they are ready to become regulars in the first team.

Maybe a "policy" in the days of Ellis and Wright but I don't think that is current as we get no cash benefit.

Victims of our own success at one end of the scale whilst not having the resources to match it at the other end.