Fantastic Mr Catpiss wrote:
This is where i'm at, and why i asked, he's not particularly pacey, he's not got fantastic quick hands or a great offload, he's not a line busting prop, he's not big wide ranging, he's not impactful, and he's not particularly an impressive tackler, so what is his area of expertise?
I mentioned this earlier this season, he had a great opportunity to solidify left 2nd row as his own at the start of the year, at best this season he's been as good as, ben currie who's been coming back from 2 knee surgeries and feeling his way back.
Thats nothing to get excited about.
I have a similar view on Livett.
I think with young players you need to have a decent sample size of games to judge them over, rather than the impression of their first 4 to 5 appearances. This works both ways. You can't write a player off too early and need to give them a decent run of games to see what they can do, but also you need to guard against overhype early on.
What I think happens quite often with young players is they come in to a team in a positive situation (eg being introduced from the bench in a relatively easy match up/ when the team is winning), other teams don't have film on them at this time and so they can have a bit of a grace period until they start having to face defences that have explicitly prepared for them. Mix this with a bit of optimism bias from fans who always hope they have found the next 'big thing' and people extrapolate some bright signs in early appearances in to a prediction of a golden future. Over a longer time frame the player's true ability is revealed, but sometimes when it didn't live up to the early hype people look for explanations like 'the coaching staff ruined them' and so on.
We've had a number of players who suffered from excess expectations because they've been overhyped when they first broke in to the team: Jon Roper, Steve Pickersgill, Kevin Penny, Rhys Evans. Then as time has gone on their limitations were exposed and they didn't live up to it. None of them went to other clubs and stepped up a level - they just looked like the same limited players elsewhere.
I think the basic problem if you compare us to Wigan/Saints is that we haven't brought through the talent in the first place. We've pushed a lot of mediocre players in to the first team, given them their 30 to 40 games and then they just move on.
The issue isn't that talent is unable to succeed at Warrington in a first team environment. We have sometimes taken genuine talent that has been brought through other clubs' youth systems but not established themselves in the first team, and with us that talent has flourished: Lee Briers, Ben Westwood, Simon Grix, Chris Bridge. Now had those guys been on our rosters as juniors, we would have been listing them like Harris and Sculthorpe as examples of big wins for our Academy. Briers and Bridge would not have been given the same opportunities to develop had they stayed at their former clubs rather than joining us.
So for me the issue isn't patience in the first team or giving opportunities to develop, it's that the level of actual talent emerging from our Academy has been well down compared to our SL peers, for a LONG TIME. I can understand being behind Wigan/Leeds/Saints, but we've also been behind Hull, Cas and Wakey in this regard as well, and for all the big PR talk that has come out of the club for decades about youth development it has been a weakness.