Captain Hook wrote:
Going round in circles SC, one minute the argument is that our young players aren’t good enough but are given too many opportunities, the next it is your point above. 6 of one and half a dozen of the other. The stand ins, whether home grown or not have generally not been good enough.
This is a good point. I think there are 2 separate issues, the quality of our young players and the fact that every good squad needs some fringe players and there are certain characteristics you want in those players too.
Fringe players are never going to be elite talents, if they are they will sign somewhere else if they aren't regulars, but ideally you want them to be versatile so they can cover various positions, be consistent performers rather than boom / bust types, and be low-ego players who will knuckle down and not rock the boat if they aren't getting in a winning side. If they have come from your academy and stay around for a long time and give you consistency, great. If you have a revolving door of signings who are fringe players at other clubs, spend a bit of time with us before moving on somewhere else (as we have done since the later TS era), not so good.
On the issue of young players not being good enough / getting more chances than they would at other clubs I think the difference between us and the likes of Wigan is just the volume coming through. They always have young players pressing for places in their team, so when their Academy players break out in the first team, it's not long before they have the next generation underneath them pushing them hard for places. If someone from the next generation is better than them, they get pushed out and moved on to clubs like Warrington.
With us, where there is less talent coming through, players are more likely to break out in to the first team and then be able to survive a lengthy time of plateauing or going backwards than they would at Wigan because we haven't got enough talent from the next generation pressing them. Rhys Evans and Dec Patton would have felt pressure from below sooner if they'd been at Wigan.