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Yes, yes hindsight is a lovely looking thing isn't it.
I may not post that much on here(and didn't at the time), but I can honestly say that I've always felt we lost out in getting Moran in place of Robinson.
Robinson played brilliantly in the 2004 play-offs and he went because of an argument with Lindsey.
He was then and is now a better player than Moran.

Maybe getting away from the point, but why did we sign Moran when we could have had a player better than the both of them in Thomas Leuluai?

Also one of the main reasons we lose a lot of young players is because we pay the 'superstars' too much and so can't afford the young players like Sean Briscoe.

bottoms up posted:
Also one of the main reasons we lose a lot of young players is because we pay the 'superstars' too much and so can't afford the young players like Sean Briscoe.

No, it's because of the 20/20 rule. We can only have 20 players earning a decent full-time wage, i.e.over £20k, whether they're "superstars" or not.
Instead of looking at the ones we've let go, why not look at the ones we've kept.
Along with Leeds, we have the best youth development in SL, and we do keep most of them.
Fuirthermore, the vast majority of the ones we let go don't go on to be successful - it's the very few exceptions that get all the attention.

bottoms up posted:
Robinson played brilliantly in the 2004 play-offs ...

Not as a scrum half. He was an impact player at hooker. We got Godwin for that so if we kept Robinson it would have been as a scrum half. So 20/20 starts to rear its head and as I mentioned in my previous post I don't think he was ready to be first choice scrum half.

I don't know if people remember this but both he and Hodgson were given presentations at the end of the season at the JJB and the club seemed genuinely sorry to see them go.

Dave

All valid arguments but no one seems to have mentioned the roll a change of club and more importantly, the change of coach makes to the way a player performs.

Players that appear mediocre in one team and get offloaded often respond to their new surroundings and become very good players. (or in the case of a lot of recent Wigan imports the other way around!)

In addition to this a player will change as they mature, a lot of the youngsters mentioned in this thread were/are literally still growing up and it makes it very difficult to predict what sort of player they will become when they start shaving on a daily basis.

There's a fair bit of myth-making about some of these things - if you think back carefully Luke came into the first team again when Lammy got injured just before the 2003 play-offs and did very little - he seemed to drown a bit in the responsibility was my impression.

But he was young so we looked forward to him developing the next season. He started the next season as scrum-half and again didn't look too impressive - and was sent on loan to Castleford. When he returned he did well, but as hooker.

None of that is to say that he wasn't/isn't a good scrum half, just that after the famous Good Friday heroics he faded a bit - & when it continued the next season I for one began to feel slightly uneasy that he may not be all we had cracked him up to be in the euphoria of the against-the-odds wins v St Helens. It looked like he needed more time, but he didn't get it with us for whatever reason.

Welski posted:
In addition to this a player will change as they mature, a lot of the youngsters mentioned in this thread were/are literally still growing up and it makes it very difficult to predict what sort of player they will become when they start shaving on a daily basis.

I think that's the most difficult thing for the club to assess. Wigan obviously produces a large number of talented youngsters, and other clubs benefit from the ones we release, but as part of the that there are transfer fees to consider. If I recall correctly, transfer fees apply to all players under 22 years of age whether or not they are under contract, but after that it's only contracted players who can attract a fee as one would expect. The club, therefore, has to make quite an early decision about which players to release if they want to attract some money to the club to compensate for the expense of training them, otherwise they get nothing at all for saving some other clubs the effort of developing their own youngsters. I think 22 is perhaps not quite late enough to make a full judgement about whether someone will be a success or not, but money is money and you can understand the club wanting to maximise its return on several years investment.

Fraggle posted:
[quote If I recall correctly, transfer fees apply to all players under 22 years of age whether or not they are under contract,

There are certainly some strange rules in RL!

Welski posted:

Fraggle posted:
[quote If I recall correctly, transfer fees apply to all players under 22 years of age whether or not they are under contract,

There are certainly some strange rules in RL!

I think the fee applied to players aged 24 or under but was changed recently. Was this the rule that meant Saints paid us a fee for Bibey?

Dave

DaveO posted:

Welski posted:

Fraggle posted:
[quote If I recall correctly, transfer fees apply to all players under 22 years of age whether or not they are under contract,

There are certainly some strange rules in RL!

I think the fee applied to players aged 24 or under but was changed recently. Was this the rule that meant Saints paid us a fee for Bibey?

Dave

It used to be 24, it was lowered not too long ago. WRT the fee for Bibey, maybe that was just Millward having one of his strange days, similar to the one where he suggested to our board that we sign Keith Mason...

DaveO posted:
I think the fee applied to players aged 24 or under but was changed recently. Was this the rule that meant Saints paid us a fee for Bibey?

Dave

Yep. And we get an extra fee when he's selected for GB.

I'll wait.