Good post and well summarised.

Does anyone actually know who identifies and signs the players? Obviously we have scouts and a recruitment team so who is actually identifying the player and does Price have the final decision? As someone who is a big critic of Price - to be fair to him our recruitment has been poor for a while now before he came in.

There's a lack of logic here. Not enough academy players and crap recruitment but we have a squad good enough to win trophies. Where are these players materialising from? Or does the coach get more out of them than we should expect?

We have a core group of players who are good enough who have been here a while, Ratchford, King, Charnley, Austin, Hill, Clark, Cooper, Currie.

But we’ve never really recruited well for the players around them. Gelling, Widdop, Davis, J Clark, Sita, Latu, Kibula.

Yes I agree on the point about lack of logic, some of our criticisms seem to face both ways and I'm not sure where I stand either.

Price seems to like Matty Ashton, he picked him up out of the championship and fast tracked him into the first team and he played him in his preferred position of fullback even when that meant favouring him ahead of one of the "established names" in Ratchford. Now you can criticise him for this and say Ashton should wait his turn till Ratchford leaves or be shoved out into an unfamiliar position - previous Wire coaches would have done this - but its not the same critique as Price doesn't give young players a shot. A lot of young players with pace burst on to the scene, then have a couple of rocky moments and get discarded, so if Price sticks by Ashton that's a pretty progressive attitude.

Then look at how Price has treated Ben Currie. He stuck by him for a long time when he was coming out of his injuries and was underperforming - previous Wire coaches would have kicked him to the kerb. Is this a good thing (he likes home grown players) or is it a bad thing (he picks players off past reputation rather than current form, some players are undroppable).

On the recruitment point I agree with Lord Tony Smith. From about 2010 to 2013 we had a top class squad, probably top 2 in the league (I preferred our squad to Wigan, but would have taken Leeds over ours because of their core of experienced match winners). From 2014 onwards it felt more like we had half or two-thirds of a top class squad. We had a number of top players leave around that time and in trying to replace them we've had a revolving door of players that haven't worked. Time has gone on and we've invested money but we haven't got the returns that we did on signings from about 2007 to 2012 when every year we were making a couple of signings that really worked out.

As a result, ever since 2014 we've been more like the 4th or 5th best squad in SL (not sure that reflects salary cap expenditure, but in terms of calibre of squad thats where I think we are). And the performances have basically reflected that. So with later TS (apart from the last horrible season) and Price, we've pretty much delivered to par. In terms of making finals we may have overachieved.

I'm not convinced about Price but I think the poor recruitment is a bigger priority to address than the coach, otherwise the same issues will arise. If this was the NFL, we'd be looking to recruit a new General Manager this year, and see how the coach works with him. We have a decent core of players, but need to fix this revolving door aspect, where we've never replaced the key retirements, and just keep cycling through high profile signings that don't work out. You can fix it from the Academy or from shrewd free agent/transfer signings, and the best teams like Wigan have been very good at both.

In 'bang for buck' terms I'd say we have under achieved and for quite a long time I don't know for a fact but would suggest that we aren't paying "4th or 5th best squad" money

Well, the academy and external recruitment are essentially both the same thing, a source of new / better talent. Clearly the academy production line has not been providing the number of squad players that we need, hence we have had to rely on external recruitment.

If you have a high quality coach then you can mitigate the lack of quality of the squad simply because he uses better tactics on the day, gets more from individual players, switches players to better positions, generates better team spirit etc etc. A good example of that would be Salford over the last two seasons where they even managed to get to a GF. I think most people would agree that SP is not in that category, indeed Salford have beaten us in all four games over the last two seasons.

In order to be successful we need a good quality squad and coach in combination. As LTS pointed out, we do have quality players in the squad but we have failed to recruit two decent bench props and brought in two poor replacements in Latu and Akauola. We also recruited Burrell, and whilst he would not have gone on the cap., he will still have been expensive. Similarly Blake Austin and Tyrone Roberts before him have been average,......but expensive. Our track record has simply not been good enough in recruitment. So that disadvantage combined with a pretty ordinary coach (who I suspect will also be very expensive) is probably the reason we have failed to challenge at the top table. We are cash rich but have made some poor decisions (JIMO)

I'd imagine that we are probably aligned with the spend of Wigan, Saints and Catalans. Wigan and Saints had the benefit of the reduced marquee spend cap allocation although Wigan have lost that with the recruitment of George Burgess and Bateman/Hastings. Catalans benefit from an Euro exchange rate not seen since before the Brexit Referendum.

You'll also have Leeds and Hull spending to the cap each year but probably not levering the marquee rule as much as we do for the full period it has been available though they appear to be catching up on that now. Then each year you'll have an outlier eg Koucash's Salford, and Huddersfield this year.

So next year there will likely be seven teams paying pretty much the same in salaries and historically over the last five years about five teams. On that basis I don't think we do that bad in respect of performance.

I would say a realistic minimum level of performance would be to win one of the three trophies every two years. On that basis Price needs to win one next year to be at the minimum acceptable level otherwise he goes. The issue we have is we've never won the premium one - Grand Final.

A fair assessment to my simplistic post my recent memories of our earlier success blighted by the Asotasi and Roberts years where we were top end spenders including forays into the transfer market (paying fees) but obviously going backwards.

A big year for all concerned coming up, we should be better than last season when we whimpered out although as you say we are in the same boat as half the division and yet the 'winning' teams come from a smaller list.

Perhaps our recruitment staff are dithering over signing decent players due to financial juggling . Recently we have been picking up left over overseas players that no other club wants & cast offs from our rivals.
One of the biggest changes we need to make is to our scouting set up & to decide what our best recruitment policy is.

Actually, playing devils advocate here, How would posters feel about price, if he'd took the grand final in 2018, but every thing else had been exactly the same for the following 2 seasons?

Would those of us wanting rid, still want rid, or would you be willing to put up with what we've had because of a GF win in the bank?

i'm intrigued to see if people would still want the board to be ruthless.

Well that is just speculation or guess work. But the fact we have not won the premium one is why these discussions arise.

Grand Final in his first year, considering what he inherited from Smith, followed by a Challenge Cup win over Saints the next season would have given him at least two blank seasons before any questioning around his position could even start to be thought about for me.


Does Price being the first Head Coach with a proper interest in the Academy and the development of those players not buy him additional time? Lots of people going on about academy player development letting us down (don't buy that myself to the same extent personally - count each club's academy products in last year's Dream Team) that really is not a short term fix that switching of leadership will assist.

Some excellent points BUT Austin and Roberts in the same category,? I’m afraid I strongly disagree!

This is a good point for discussion.

I think the fan base would be more chilled out, because we had won the big one, so some of the short term angst about why have we spent all this money and never won it, would have gone.

Also being the coach to deliver our first GF would mean a certain section of the fanbase will always be on board, just like TS had his bitter-enders like me, who were still on board with him when we were in the bottom eights, or a certain section of the Liverpool fanbase forever reveres Rafa for winning the Champions League.

But for me the calculation about whether the coach is the right one or not isn't about giving a reward for past achievements, it's about whether the coach is better than the next best realistically available alternative, in terms of taking the club forward.

So if the other options are all crap, we have to be really dire, to get rid of the coach.
If Craig Bellamy or someone is available wanting a "fresh challenge" in the UK, then you have to be pretty sure about Price regardless of what he has won in the past.

And most importantly never fall in to the trap of just taking the punt on 'change' when you don't know what change involves, eg "why not make a change, it can't get any worse". It can always get worse. Or "we've done well, but we need someone different now to take us to the 'next level'". Hudds did this with sacking Paul Anderson. Hows the next level coming along?

This is crucial in the recruitment of a coach, or players. TS if not top of the list was certainly very close to it, I'm not sure about SP when he joined, but i doubt he was top of the list. We also had to be patient and wait for TS to become available. However, when you look back at Steve Anderson and David Plange, we are in a far better place than I think we realise.

We have much better resources than the Anderson and Plange era so I don't see that as a reasonable comparison.

Price can be expected to do better.

I'd give him a lot more leeway for having that trophy in the bag.

Yes, it's only winning one game, but trophy wins buy a lot of credit.

Man United fans put up with way more of Mourinho's dross football and alienating man management style than they would otherwise have done because he had a track record of winning trophies, which he transferred to United. They ran out of patience eventually, but extended him more patience than they would otherwise have done.

Well obviously it didn't buy Price much credit with the fans because I remember within weeks of that Challenge Cup final win everyone on here was slagging him off for dull rugby and failing in the playoffs after that long losing streak in the second half of the season.

I'm not a massive Price fan but I think his, and the team's achievement in winning the Challenge Cup has been understated. It is the only time I can remember us going up against a team that was clearly superior to us in a final and winning, it was a masterclass of negating a top team's strengths.

Comparisons don't always hold up, but that's why I think the United comparison is a fair one.

It's reasonable, given our situation and resources, to expect a team that plays coherent, decent rugby and a coach that actually improves players rather than them treading water or going backwards in some cases.

I’m all for the Wire and Wolfie media video. Wolfie is probably getting on for being the best known mascot in RL if not other sports too.
Well done KF for that area.
Anyways, there was a time where Aussies would likely be able to only name one SL team, whereas now, they may be able to name a handful and I think Wire would be the first choice in recall in most.

Yes, SP should be doing better (something one and all on here would agree with, I would have thought), and yes we have more resources than the Anderson/Plange era), but my point was to do with the next "available alternative". We'd crossed off 5 or 6 names before we got we got down to Steve Anderson, which did not improve on the coach we'd sacked. We should only replace Price when an available alternative, that improves us a club, becomes available. I'm hopeful that we have somebody lined up for 2022, already, but not holding my breath.

All hypothetical MPN but what would you do IF we managed to win the GF with Price in charge?

Would we want to miss out on a coach upgrade to a Bellamy I understand that lining someone up isn't the same as having them signed but in those circumstances would Price be retained or still bulleted/moved on by mutual agreement with an 'excuse' that anyone could coach that squad with Inglis on fire, Widdop clicking, the new look bench being a force, the luck we've had with injuries, the young lads kicking on a bit like some Leeds fans that put their success down to Peacock Sinfield and Maguire rather than McDermott?

It's all about who is best placed to deliver a successful title defence. If we had just won the title with Price in charge, then we probably had a coaching approach that was working to get the best out of this squad so any kind of change would be a risk. Even a coach with a great track record in the NRL like Bellamy, wouldn't come with a slam dunk guarantee that it would transfer over to Super League. And also with a new coach there would be a transition period where it took a while for the squad to adjust to his approach. Usually a new coach comes in when things have gone wrong under the old coach so there is patience during the adjustment process, but if you've gone from being champions to struggling early the next season, the pressure comes on from the start. You see this when coaches leave voluntarily on a high - like when Graham Murray left Leeds to take over the Roosters and they struggled to adjust to Dean Lance, or after Ferguson left United.

And if you really felt that the squad was so good that "anybody could coach it to success" then you wouldn't go chasing a big name who would probably want big money...you'd just let the current coach's contract come to the end then you'd appoint one of the assistants to replace him on cheaper wages.

The only reason you'd replace the coach after winning the GF (other than if he was leaving voluntarily to take an NRL job etc) would be if he was toxic in the dressing room. If you were the owner/CEO and players were saying "we've won this title in spite of the coach, not because of him" you may make a change like Wigan did after they won the Double with John Dorahy.

If only we had problems like this UR! That's a win, win scenario, where I would have a nice block of shares in Harvey's Bristol Cream.

I think that was my point Sally having the best available coach isn't a guarantee of success and success isn't a based on a singularity there are many factors some of which are beyond anyone's control even a Ferguson who absolutely picked the right time to go. He'd earned that right by creating a winning dynasty but you could argue that him and Gill going together really hampered the next coach.

I'm not so sure that IF Price won it he'd get the full credit I think it'd buy him another year maximum before a hypothetical thread announcing the arrival of Pepenhuyzen and the Bromwich brothers to Warrington was derailed by a new coach thread if we made a poor start.