For me Fa'afili was one of those players who made a successful career out of one good attribute. He wasn't particularly quick or elusive but he was good at competing for the ball in the air. He wasn't as tall as guys like Matt King but he could out jump people. It was during the Fa'afili era that we started really developing the Briers bomb as an attacking weapon.
Fa'afili also benefited from playing outside Gleeson too but he was already a successful NZ international before he joined us without Gleeson there. There was a Test a year or so before he joined us where Stacey Jones carved up GB with high kicks and Fa'afili got a hat-trick. He did get stick from the fans though despite scoring a lot of tries, probably because he came across as having a 'chilled'/casual attitude and sometimes looked like he was ambling about the field. It was an upgrade to move him on and bring in Hicks who was just as good as an aerial threat but brought much more.
Gleeson seems to be remembered as a better player now than he was at the time. When he left us, the consensus here was that he had been a class act for his first couple of seasons and then went through the motions a bit for his next couple of years, just turning it on in big games. Certainly nobody was complaining when TS shipped him out to Wigan soon after coming in. I remember it feeling frustrating that there was a narrative building of "Gleeson is on the decline" from his Warrington form and then when the end of season internationals would come round he looked top class again.
Fa'afili and Gleeson have a significant role in Warrington history though as it was their signing that first signalled an upgrade in our ambitions following Simon Moran getting majority ownership. If you had gone back 18 months earlier to that GB-NZ test where Fa'afili got a hat-trick and Gleeson was playing for GB, you would
never have thought Warrington would have signed those two. After we signed them, bigger names started to come.
