Boss Hog wrote:
There has been a policy at Wire of signing and then playing squad fillers.
These players are then selected for first team games instead of our Academy lads being blooded.
Hence the Academy player`s development is stunted and they are eventually discarded as not good enough.
Russell and Minikin are two examples in our current set-up, who are not Super League standard players, and shouldn`t be employed by Warrington.
I’d agree to a point, I was very against the signing of Minikin and Russell at the time (Minkin has been shocking imo, Russell has done pretty well all things considered) as I thought it would take up first team opportunity’s for academy players. However, if those players aren’t deemed good enough to go on to first team, you need to fill in on squad players from outside the club.
No young players are leaving and going on to do great things elsewhere, surely we would see that if it was just a case of the club not giving the opportunity to good young players? That suggests the academy system at Warrington has not been producing good enough players, blooding players who are not good enough will achieve nothing. When a young player has come through, they’ve been played once deemed ready - Thewlis, Wrench etc, i’d fully expect them to go on to sign for another SL club if they left us. Green has looked comfortable considering he is only 18 and has been given opportunity - frustratingly we do sometimes see these players sitting in the bench for 80 minutes though, which I feel is pointless. However I think Powell has shown he will use young players if they are good enough - Thewlis & Wrench regularly playing ahead of Lineham and Minkin over the past couple of years as the example.
Post covid the academy team has been top 3 each year in the comp, so we are starting to see some consistency, before that they were very up and down. Australia tours are starting every 2 years which I think will be great for development, The Player Development Pathway is getting lots of the towns 11-18 year olds having coaching sessions with the club on a regular basis which is another positive - more players getting greater exposure to the club and quality coaching sessions.
I think we will see the situation continue to improve over the next couple of years.
