"Over the last three years at the Catalan Dragons, the number of French players has gone down while the number of Australians has gone up"

So said Clarke after the game last night. Horse crap. The number of Antipodeans has remained the same while the number of Frenchmen has gone up. I'll save most of my ire for a forthcoming website feature, but suffice to say I was quite furious when I heard that and it went unchallenged.

We hear all kinds of donkey-doo about our side, apparently the academy side doesn't exist, despite playing regular games, and we're mostly australian, despite fielding less and less as the year went on (and, might I add, playing better and relying more and more on our French contingent).

You can't blame the poor love, after all we all know that Guisset, Pelo and Bently are all Ozzies.

Can't be d looking for it right now, but I think my favourite quote on this forum was something along the lines of "someone tell me exactly how does Mounis qualify for France"

Excellent, almost as good as at our fist match in the SL, when a Hull fan said something along the lines of "they've always been dirty players this lot".

Didn't you know that Bosc is German?

To be fair though, it is a bit of a shame that no new French players made their debuts in 2009.

20 minutes into a pre-season friendly, that. Hilarious.

The problem there is that you can only make a debut once and the dozens of youngsters that emerged in the injury-ravaged 2007 campaign are now the mainstay of the club.

For our first team or the national side?

Catalans. A few players debuted for the national side didn't they?

Bartheau started for France for the first time in the England match in Paris. A number of ingenues in the Squad atm.

As to the Catalan side, what John_D said, we've had alot of new faces over the last three years, just none "new" this year - though some of the new faces have made the transition to first team, which is good.

You say that like it's some sort of revelation …

dont rise to it, let him wander around within 'in goal areas' with a cotton bud taped to his face.

Point taken, I was just a bit disappointed when I saw that Catalans were the only Super League side not to give anyone a debut this year. Probably it's fair to say that Catalans have as many French players as they are going to get and it's time for an additional side to allow further players to play at the highest level.

I hope we will follow other clubs and downsize our useless forrigner quotient by two next year, so the possibility of a couple new players to come through.
We were this close to bringing through a halfback, Bartheau made the 19 on a couple occaisions, but no joy in the end. Sadly Perry may well have kept out our potential debutant.