Quote ="Jack Napier"Fair points. I think with young players fans have a tendency to focus on the good games and ignore the bad at the start, thinking that the bad games will stop happening over time.
I think with Livett though we didn't give him enough time. He was poor in the CC Final (also got injured in the game before) but was only 21 at the time and only played for us 15 times after that, and a lot of those were from the bench.
Sometime after Longstaff breaks into the team on a regular basis, he will end up going through a bad patch. I feel you should stick with players for a time to see if they come through it. Dec Patton, for example, never did but at least we knew for sure he wasn't good enough.
Penny, Evans, and Patton all played over twice as many games for Warrington as Livett did.'"
I agree there's that optimism bias where fans tend to extrapolate from early performances and assume the player will get better and also there's an inherent bias towards home grown players where everybody hopes that we will find the next Harris or Sculthorpe and so when a player is more of an "unwritten book" they tend to idealise them. Especially people who have watched them in Academy games where they have been dominating their peers and think it will translate into the pros.
Some young players benefit from a honeymoon period where the rest of the league doesn't have any film on them but after a while other coaches will start looking at them and any weaknesses start getting picked up and exploited and thats where players start to go through a bad patch. But more of our young players seem to get stuck in these bad patches than they do say at Wigan. I was always struck by Wigan especially in the Shaun Wane era, how their young players seem very pro-ready for their age, they play more like senior players earlier on and seem better equipped to handle things. They are coming in to first team with a very well rounded rugby education.
I tend to be a cynic when it comes to our hyped up youngsters. I've heard for 20 odd years how 'the future's bright' and we always have all these supposed super stars coming through so I am invariably less enthused by whoever is the latest hype train on this forum. I'm more biased towards our guys who have come through and done it over a long period of time. I feel like I view Chris Riley, Paul Wood and Mike Cooper more favourably than the consensus on this forum.
