The nearest kebab house and the number of a taxi in my case

... and there lays our problem
Hill is a shadow of the man he was 7 or 8 years ago (obviously time catches up with people)
Cooper is a bumped up second row (and like Hill, getting no younger)
Likewise Philbin (but has youth)
Akauola runs hard, 5 or 6 times a game. A slight improvement on Danny Lima, but spends most of his time not on the pitch.

These 4, as good as they are, are why we STILL miles away from lifting the SL.

Add to this, behind these four, the blandness of Hughes and the non effectiveness of Clark, and Currie is still a shadow of the player he was, despite playing a full year, with little injury issues., our pack is beginning to scare me. Don't get me wrong, Hill and Cooper remain top quality SL players, and we have a shining light in Clarke, but or pack is too small, and getting no better.

Packs lay the foundations for halves to provide the back 5, try scoring opportunities. Yes, we have a better pack than most, but it's not good enough to get the October prize.

Sorry.

The inside of my eye lids, for me.

If we miss out on a top line prop, after going to press weeks ago about our intentions to bring at least one in, someone needs to be held accountable. It was clear last season, and had been for years, that the front row needs some investment.

Recruitment for a number of years has been poor, often pinning our hopes on one big name halfback and ignoring the fact that we have a deficiency in the middle (Sandow, Roberts, Austin),

I just hope this isn’t history repeating itself and people are hiding behind Widdop and calling the recruitment campaign a success. It’s not, and a halfback won’t cure our problem

When Warrington FINALLY act, we'll end up with the fat girl who looks after her better looking mates handbags, while they're dancing.

We'll then discover, she's got breath straight from Satan's aris, and the personality of a traffic warden.

Then we take Uncle Rico's advice.
Kebab
Cab
and ponder the early hours away, wondering if we're ever going to meet Miss Wonderful

Don't matter who we have as prop and let's be honest we've had mozza Mona's carvell as front row with hill and woody as back up..still not good enough to get over the jinx of winning the end of season comp....next season won't be any different. Either Wigan saints or Leeds will be our so called champs and the year after and year after and so on....

Trouble is Karl cites "we need to manage within the cap" as an excuse. But this is no excuse at all. This is the challenge to extract maximum value for the spend and I am afraid we do not do this. Exhibit A - Clark. Also whilst we have almost zero youth progression into decent work-a-day SL pro's we always need to be buying in players which invariably cost more than home grown.
Whilst I am at it what is the point in spending big on former international class wingers when they don't get the ball in attacking situations.

Price's 5 drives and kick and hope opposition make mistakes may work (albeit dull) if we had an imperious pack and we have superb completion and very low error rate. We have none of those.

The club invited journos to their marketing meeting last week. Looks like we are concentrating on Wolfie's next stunt over signing a couple of props.

The daft thing as well is that Prices's tactics are only effective with a large dominant pack. It's such a waste to have 2 such fine wingers in Lineham and Charnley if they're only used as bulldozers. This season will tell all for me with Widdop in our ranks. If we can't create running lines and attacking moves in the backs with our halfback combination, then serious questions need to be asked.
I'm hoping that Price will have learnt from last season and realize that one up rl is neither effective or entertaining; either of these should be a minimum expectation. I just hope that during the off-season Price is drilling our players with moves and finding an alternative way to play rather than that drivel we watched last year.

This is what I don't understand though... Last season from our first game right up until Magic Weekend, we were playing a pack that weren't trying to batter their way down field. We saw a fairly small, slightly lightweight mobile pack going from left to right back to left again. Our props were ball players and offloaders. Our backrowers were hitting lines for the props in front of the halvs and winning quick PTB's. Everything was fast and direct.

Then after easter it all suddenly stopped. Why? The majority of us, I think, thought it was all about conservation and trying not to blow ourselves out before the 'business end of the season'. Then it was because we had lost Ratch, our 3rd Pivot. Then it was because we had lost Blake.

Ultimitely though at the end of the season we had the same team that was playing classy rugby at the start of the season and we were still playing 5 drives and boot it. Why? Price needs to be held accountable for our tactics and the way we finished the season off.

i've said it before, it all goes back to the saints game, we hit a brick wall, then struggled to recover afterwards.

Yes but why go away from what was working? We won games the first way, lost to Saints. Change of tactic after one loss, drastic but fair enough... lost 6 on the bounce playing a certain way, no change. Why?!?

It was funny once, now it’s boring.

I've only said it once.

youtu.be/9gbJTtxhy5w

youtu.be/9gbJTtxhy5w

It's OK LTS, I was listening very carefully. Agree with the sentiment regarding our style of play, and woefully boring tactics. SP has to change things, otherwise we should be looking to replace him should there be no improvement by Easter 2020.

Didn’t mean you

I’m just bored with the marketing funnies I’d rather have fun watching us win a Grand Final.

Well i'd say BMM will definately here next year as his manager has just been suspended by the NRL. All 16 clubs have been told not to deal with him, good result for us

...and Waterfields

This was one of our characteristics in the Cullen years, which has reemerged. We had a talented squad back then, but we had poor resilience when it came to a bad result or being in a bad run of form, it tended to perpetuate. Cullen used to talk about it in press conferences too, saying that some result from a few weeks ago 'knocked the stuffing out of us'. On the other hand if Bradford or Saints had a bad loss, the team facing them next would end up facing the backlash! That was a big difference between us and the top sides back then.

Once the rot set in this year it seemed like we didn't do anything to change it. It wasn't even like we were blowing hot and cold, we just became the same side that meekly accepted second best to teams.

BUT we also have to acknowledge that there were two anomaly results that did not fit this trend - the CC semi final and final, when we beat good sides and played very well despite our form leading up to them. Given that we won a major trophy off the back of that, it was pretty significant!

The club's PR machine will make sure most of our fans accept the recruitment campaign as a success. They will make a big fuss of Widdop, there will be the right sort of interviews with the Warrington Guardian where the players talk about how well training is going, some of the longer serving players will be brought out to give the line "this is the strongest squad we've had in my time here". Either Karl Fitzpatrick or one of the coaches will say something like "there are no excuses now, it's time to win the Grand Final".

The mood on here will be a lot more positive after these feel good stories over the Christmas period. Wait till people start posting threads of predictions for SL 2020, at least half of the posts will have us finishing top, others who don't have us finishing top will say we're going to win the GF. Even rubber duckie who seems to be in critical mode right now, will be telling everyone that we will win the double.

There will be some thread about the Academy that concludes we have a set of young guns ready to take the league by storm. Then there will be one about what's your strongest starting 17 which will conclude that the big difference between this year and the years before is the 'strength in depth' - in 2020 we'll almost be able to field 2 squads equally strong!

Then wait till we have the pre-season army camp, we'll have stories in the Warrington Guardian about how they spent a week on Brecon Beacons training with the paras and it will be red meat to the masses on here, there will be posts saying how great the current regime is, how in the old days they used to go for holiday camp in Lanzarote but that wouldn't be tolerated in the elite set up we have today.

Meanwhile a few of the old timers on here won't have drunk the 'Kool Aid' (Wires71, lefty, me) and will start asking pointed questions, we will get told we are free to go and support Wigan, if we can't get behind the team.

Then the first two weeks of the season are going to be against Wigan and Saints and it will be a cold shower of reality.

Brilliant post totally agree with everything you've put here...the 1st 2 games could see price being shipped out cos for the life of me I can't see anything but 2 thumpings hope I'm wrong...

Awesome post, enjoyed reading and having a laugh.

Anyways I’m to old to fall for all that bull about how the roses will smell better next season. A lot of people on here agree we are short on a killer prop and no covering the ground with snow is going to hide that fact.

I'm throwing all of my hope behind Sammy Kibula now. GO SAMMY GO!!!!!

..and there we have it, in a nutshell

I've not read the WG for a few years, but I can almost predict word for word, Fitzpatrick's corporate bull, like it's from a late 80's yuppie in his striped shirt and red braces. I refuse to fall for it, because I've heard it, SO many times before, and despite 4 CCs in the last decade, nothing has changed. We are a side which takes underachievement to a new level. God knows we've had the investment. Peter Higham bringing Boyd, Tamati, Johnson, Davidson, Blake and Roach, Gregory and Drummond (whilst retaining Mike Gregory) at considerable expense. Then a total change of track, and investment in Welsh Union talent, and then the Youth policy era of early to mid 90's.
Fast forward almost a decade, and we have Moran (and Middleton's) investment, and we STILL haven't won (what's considered) the title.
I've said this umpteen times before, we're too nice. Saints, Wigan and to a certain extent Leeds don't accept failure from club legends. They sack em. We give them "jobs for the boys" positions, or contract extensions to losing finalist coaches

The "KOOL aid" had turned into 10 day old, sour milk, and is unpalletable. There are 30-50 regulars on these pages, and bar a few delibarate naysayers, we can ALL see where our problems/deficiencies lay, it's a pity the club don't.

Cynical...no
I CAN see the wood for the trees