The gap between these 2 heavyweights and the rest of super league is just massive. Ian Watson was giving it large this week about how he wants his Huddersfield team to be the 3rd team in the mix. Come on. Hudds need to build an academy first, something that St Helen’s and Wigan are 30 years in front of everyone else with. Instead of signing players no one else wants, concentrate on grass roots as that’s the basis for St Helen’s and Wigans success.

We all want to see more more teams in the grand final mix but it’s not going to happen for years. Just don’t beat your chest to the press just because your club is the best of a very bad bunch

This shows had bad super league is. The supposed 3rd best team in super league get absolutely mullered by a team with 11 men.

This is why we need expansion, because the likes of Huddersfield and hull fc are just an embarrassment

The best attacking team and the best defensive team starting to show their metal now, whilst the other contenders are falling away.

French to score 7 try's is impressive no matter what team they are playing.

The like of you keep on harping on about expansion just where are you going to get these players from if the other rich clubs Huddersfield, Warrington, Hull fc and Leeds can't reach the same quality isn't that enough to get through that thick skull of yours.

Congratulations on the win that was impressive

A basis, not the basis and not remotely the most important.

Investment banking and software systems for workforce management are more relevant factors. My own club’s rise from the second tier to be one of the large group of SL whipping boys, on to which McManus and Lenegan can vent the full fury of their fortunes, has relied on personal injury and medical negligence claims.

Money wins. That’s just how it is. Enjoy your team’s success, but don’t think that means you have some special insight as to what underpins it, and stick your sporting moralising and bs blueprint for success up your booty. Please.

Saints performance last night was immense, no question.
Their forwards completely dominated all night and when they went a man down, that effort actually seemed to increase so, well played.

Wigan stuffing FC is a different kettle of fish though.

FC havent exactly been setting the world alight and when a side starts running hot, with the other side off their game, you see some blowout scores.
However, well played Wigan, you can only beat what is in front of you.

As for Huddersfield, they flatter to deceive but, seem to have a huge hangover from their cup final defeat and it's knocked their confidence big time.

Right now, it would be a brave man to bet against a Saints v Wigan GF but, Catalan could still have plenty to say and if Huddersfield sort themselves out, they could come good again.

As for expansion





Unless Wales fall out with RU or we allow a full side of Aussie and Kiwis, where on earth would the players come from to fill these expansion sides ?

Down the line, we may struggle to have enough youngsters coming through for the 12 or 10 SL clubs that currently make up the top flight.

Look more to develop promising players and youngsters. Most teams seemed to go for 1 or 2 big name (usually Aussies) signings rather than work on player development. There are examples of players currently playing Super League who came from the Championship and were patient, developed their game and broke through. Benefiting the clubs who were prepared to be patient with the development. I'm not suggesting it is the total answer. Don't really want to name names about individual clubs, but as Warrington fans themselves criticise the club policy of big money signings at the expense of development I'll use them as an example. It's not all about money, if it were Warrington would have won several Grand Finals.

It isn’t all about money… just mostly.

It is definitely more about money than it is patience. Even then, patience is a luxury only the rich clubs can afford. Even if it weren’t for relegation, what sort of message does it send to fans and players, young or otherwise, if we say we’re not going to worry much about winning for a few years at a club that already doesn’t win much? Jamie Peacock’s 5-year plan for Hull KR should be a cautionary tale for the whole of SL.

You know that saying about the devil’s greatest trick was convincing the world that he doesn’t exist? I sometimes wonder if Saints and Wigan fans aren’t just naively smug/smugly naive (apologies for the gross generalisation) but are smart enough to use the patience bs to bulwark their dominance, sending the dimwitted poor off down the wrong path. As in so much else in life! I’d kind of admire that.

Both St Helens and Wigan have a plethora of local youngsters in key positions who are outstanding talents. Players you can build a team around. That’s the blueprint for their success.

Some of these players weren’t even stars at academy level. It’s all about the coaching set up. If your club can’t produce the same standard they need to look at the coaches

No, it isn’t.

It isn’t all about any one thing. More than any other single thing, it is about money.

Look, I’m sort of sorry if this is a Santa-isn’t-real thing, but I feel at some point you sort of deserve the truth. And in fairness, you’re not going to get it from ex-players-turned-pundits who played most of their careers at rich clubs, or commentators whose livelihoods depend on pretending anything could happen this week or year and isn’t that exciting?

Right, I’m off to tell some Halifax and Swinton fans how their clubs should be run, with some implied blame that it is their own shortcomings and lack vision that has led to their clubs languishing in the lower divisions, and if they could just understand that East Hull has a better culture than the places they come from they could maybe start to emulate us and get into SL. Just like I wake up every day and wish I’d grown up in St Helens, and breathed the same rarefied air as… oh, ffs… all the players whose names would scan properly are from Widnes or Wigan, so it’ll have to be Jonny Lomax.

So that is patience and coaching set-up addressed. Any more nonsense, self-delusional silver bullets you’d me to smack into the bleachers for you?

Very much so, you don't need to rely on "money for success" its more what you can achieve and promote at Academy level and as you say what superleague see from the championship clubs. For the saints half the team are from the academy and didn't spend a lot of money getting Walmsley from Dewsbury and Batchelor from York those 2 are now international players.

Stabilty in players and coach are another important factor, quite a few clubs have a large turnaround of players, you could say the current top 4 clubs at the moments are not doing a lot of chopping and changing.

At the moment Wigan and Saints are the benchmark they are not jumping on the money merry go round we just don't have a salary cap to make that work.

It’s very hard to prove a causative effect but it is noticeable that the end of Bradford’s successful era coincided with the money running out, and they’ve continued to struggle while poor despite having a pretty productive academy. The couple of times poor relation teams (Cas and Salford) have made a run to the GF it wasn’t based on academy products. Salford didn’t have one and afaik it still isn’t confirmed whether Cas will be allowed to keep theirs in its current form, because it was so unproductive at that time. They got their short-term stuff sorted out and that is the best that can be hoped for without sustained and substantial spending. There just aren’t any counter examples in the SL era.

Incumbency as a top team, and the associated stability/continuity are fair points. I’d say that is second most important after money.

It’s ironic. One could say Saints and Wigan are actually the most narrow minded of all of SL. They were at the forefront of the split with the RFL, the appointment of Robert Elstone, and now cutting the league down to 10 so they can have more TV money. Wigan and Saints need less influence on the game because they are the ones causing damage.

Saints are top of the league but can’t sell their ground week in week out? Yet other teams get slandered for their support?

There have only been 4 clubs who have been Superleague Champions and all 4 had a good academy product. If their was no money at all to buy overseas players of reasonable quality (which is a distinct possibilty) then Wigan and Saints would still be in the top 2 with Leeds slowly creeping up that particular ladder.

For that reason, its just my opinion the grass roots via the academy pathway is the primary importance above anything else.

I,m thinking the other way round its the lower clubs that are holding back the growth of Superleague, those clubs have vetoed some of the expansion ideas and instead of the standard of the lower clubs coming up to the top 4 clubs the game is stagnated .

Saints will never sell out their ground because their is very little away support, Huddersfield Giants 4th in the league only brought 95 fans last night and most of the other lower clubs are similar 100 to 200 fans and that includes Leeds as well. There is also the fact that SKY can show games on Thurs-Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon and then you have C4 joining the party.

You are entitled to it but I wholeheartedly disagree (sometimes aggressively so, when feeling provoked

). That said, a good academy can somewhat mitigate the challenges faced by the whipping boy clubs, and a poor one can exacerbate them. Rovers’ has not offered a good return on investment over getting on for 15 years and I do hope that changes. Obviously we’ll struggle to hold onto good players when it is only ever the same handful of clubs that win trophies and stretch the limits of the cap, but even so. If it doesn’t improve, there’s always the example of Cas who got much better when they focused less on academy products… as a consolation hope.

But all clubs face that to differing degrees. Saints have just lost Grace to union, Wigan have likely to lose KPP to the NRL (and have lost a few over the last few years). HKR have seen a couple come in from the academy over the last few years, I’m curious, why do you think you will struggle to keep Mike’s Lewis at the club for example?

It also extends beyond the academy as well. Both Saints and Wigan have really structured pathways into the first team. It’s actually quite rare you will see a youngster dropped into Saints/Wigan rip it up and instantly become a starter these days, as they will have gone through the phases of their debut year, being a fringe player, breaking through, and only then being seen as a first choice. Welsby is a really good example of that. Too many clubs (especially those like Warrington) will dump a promising kid from the academy in the first team, expect them to perform in 20+ games and eventually break their confidence and development.

Maybe it is just a bit of a broken sporting ecosystem. I don’t think one set of clubs is more to blame than any other.

It does feel like a bit of dead end though. I mean there’s Leeds fans being newly bored, that’s quite funny. But it is finding interest in other people’s boredom!

The big 5 European football leagues are dominated by small numbers of clubs. Bayern Munich have won the last 10 German titles, Juventus won Serie A 9 times in a row before Inter an Milan won one a piece, PSG have won 8 of the last 10 in France. Atletico Madrid have only twice broken the Real Madrid-Barcelona duopoly since Valencia were Spanish Champions in 2004. So it isn’t just us.

I’m sure those champion clubs have good cultures too, and tell fans of Stuttgart, Montpellier, Empoli and Celta Vigo all about it, and how they should be doing more to make their leagues more competitive. I’m sure they appreciate the advice just as much as I do that of fans of Wigan and St Helens.

If Lewis continues to progress, and Rovers go with ‘patience’ rather than ‘ambition’ or our ambition is just constrained by finances, then at some point it seems likely he might want the professional satisfaction of competing for trophies. Like LMS and Tony Clubb, as examples that spring randomly to mind. Being associated with winning teams in his prime will also likely secure him the option of better deals later in his career.

You make a good point about structured pathways. Saints and Wigan can run through the season on cruise control, giving youngsters confidence without too much pressure. They’ll still be top 4. If the lad makes a mistake you win by 10 rather than 16 (or 30 rather than 36), or even if you lose this game you’ll win 20 others. Our youngsters make a mistake, and it costs us a win when we might have to wait a month for another, or they lose in each of their first four appearances… it’s a tough route. And maybe that job as a landscape gardener and playing part-time for Doncaster starts to feel more attractive. In other sports underdog teams are reputed to raise their games against top teams, but in SL they’re more seen as a ‘free hit’ and the attitude is increasingly for teams to save themselves for more winnable games. It’s teams like Rovers that are targeted as beatable. The way around all that is maybe to go for loan deals to the Championship… but without much or any SL experience we’re sending them to Workington and Cornwall so they’re not winning even at that level!

When was the last time Saints or Wigan signed a highly rated young player from another SL team? Certainly in recent years all of Saints signings have been either from the NRL, or the lower divisions. We went through a phase of signing established SL journeymen during the Cunningham era, but I can’t really think of anything similar to Jake Truman for example. Agitating and disrupting highly talented juniors tend to be a Warrington trait (see Matty Nicholson, they were pushing for Truman last year etc). On the specific Lewis example, Saints have Dodd and Wigan Smith, so I think it’s unlikely there’s a risk of poaching.

Part of the reason Saints and Wigan have been successful is they tend to be able to pay less than market value for the players coming through their academy, giving them deeper squads, and pick and choose the opportunities they give. They also tend to be more patient. Ben Davies had to wait until 23 for his chance this year with Saints, same with Sam Royle whom HKR have just

Bateman to Wigan from Bradford would qualify there tbf.

That was 2013 wasn’t it? 9 years sort of proves the point. I’m not saying never but it’s not really how either teams recruitment strategy works!

You both have a tendency to suck them up at junior level, it's no wonder they have stars in there eye

Do you not realise that St Helens is only a small town. Wigan, Warrington are triple the size in population. Leeds & Hull are massive cities.

You can also pay less than us (for example) for pretty much any player; we have to pay a relative premium because we don’t offer trophies… which then feels a bit self-fulfilling. Even if we do outbid you, we’re getting somebody more motivated by money than by winning.

The number of academy products in Saints team is genuinely impressive. I don’t want to underestimate all the hard work that goes on behind the scenes. But it doesn’t feel like you’re reliant on it. If you had a few fallow years, you could pay fees to fill the gap and that provides confidence even if you don’t have to do it.

The academy is a good place to invest extra cash, once you’re already spending up to the cap. Diverting money away from the first team makes less sense if you’re not and when your day-to-day SL existence is dreary in a good year and excruciating in a bad year, and those kids whose confidence isn’t ruined will likely leave to compete higher up the table. Fwiw, our club CEO completely disagrees with me and is fully bought in to the Saints model, so I get to be right or happy… if we stay in SL long enough to test the theory. The Rovers fans nearly all seem to be on board with it too. If Rovers can generate enough revenue to field and maintain a strong first team, then a strong academy would be a very valuable complement. Maybe with the ground purchase and potential development, [imaybe[/i it’ll become possible. I don’t think ‘academy first’ is likely to work. We need it all together and for that we’d need an initial and substantial injection of capital that will never see a financial return. On top of what the current owner already puts in.

I would be curious to know how much more Saints have spent on their academy over the last 10 years and compare it with Rovers’ spend. Have we spent much less than you (I assume so, but would like to know the difference) or just spent it much, much less effectively… or both?!