Jimathay wrote:
It our peak was always just a bit too short given the age of our key players, so our window for winning it was just a little to small.
Every team that wants sustained success faces the same challenge of replacing players that get older and our recruitment plan on the face of it looked sensible. In our peak I would have said our three most important players were Michael Monaghan, Briers and Morley. Back then if someone had said to us the replacement plan is Man of Steel Daryl Clark, bringing in a couple of the best young British halfbacks in Myler and Ratchford plus G O'B coming through the ranks, and although we didn't know how good he was at the time, Chris Hill we'd have thought that looked good.
Westerman and Lineham were signings who had been successful in SL and Russell and the recall of Penny were also moves that looked like we were taking a punt on talent.
Those signings had mixed success and overall did not replace the core players we lost but I think what really killed us was the slow attrition of the lesser names of the successful era: Paul Wood, Higham, Grix, Bridge, Riley plus the ageing of Westwood and Harrison. Our recruitment post 2011 has been poor and we just haven't either brought in players good enough to replace them and also our pipeline of youth talent has not been what we hoped. Other than Currie it's just been a succession of players who we had high hopes but didn't have the ability to handle SL in the way that the others did.
If we'd have got the recruitment right and some of those players who seemed to be promising signings, had delivered what we thought, we could have extended our window of being able to compete for trophies in the way that Leeds and Wigan coped with losing their key players.
