I suppose we could fit that in. Sally reckons it will mean we will have to play 10 or 12 games a week towards the end of the season like his beloved Wigan did, but hey, I am a new man, lets go for it.

Why do you have this attitude that you can only get sustained success through cheating?

What about sign the best players with a winning mentality and create a culture of ongoing success like Wigan did in rugby league or like Man United did under Ferguson. Also look at what Gary Hetherington has done at Leeds with guys who are winners like Sinfield, Burrow, McGuire and co, they aren't satisfied with resting on their laurels they want to fill Leeds trophy cabinet winning SL year after year. All these teams got their success legally.

Do you accept the Kangaroos as a great team or do you think their sustained success in international RL is down to being on drugs?

Simon Moran and Tony Smith have shown what can be done if you have the financial investment to target the top players, then have the right coaching set up that creates a successful culture. We have won 3 Challenge Cups, made a Grand Final and won a minor premiership without busting the salary cap or failing drugs tests.

So from this great start would you not want us to go onwards and be the number one force in our sport or is ambition only allowed at clubs like Wigan and Man United?

obviously the salary cap prevents anyone doing what wigan did...

sure we can compete at the top end of the market and get some of the best signings.... but we cant have all of them.

I don't have an attitude that says you can only have sustained success through cheating. Liverpool had a long successful period which was down to the culture, desire, coaching, attention to detail etc etc. Berisford is doing the same with cycling. If Wire can win everything for the next 10 years within the rules and spirit of the game, I will be delighted.

Ambition is essential. Armstrong had it coming out of his ears. But if you attempt to give yourself an unfair advantage (and I know that can be difficult to define), then you destroy the point of competing in the first place. It is hardly surprising that as Deckchair pointed out, we have moved to a salary cap.

Liverpool just bought all the best players like Wigan did.

When I started watching football they went out and signed McMahon, Barnes, Beardsley, Houghton and Rush. Before that they had been signing guys like Dalglish, Keegan and Souness. Players that dominated their era.

Whats the difference between doing that, and Wigan signing Hanley, Bell, Offiah and co?

Wigan had more home grown players in the core of their dominant team than Liverpool did. Man United did as well.

So was Liverpool's success not through the unfair advantage of just signing up the top players?

Passing the ball back to the keeper as well?

I don't have the facts to back this up completely as Liverpool aren't my team but IMO they didn't sign the top players, they signed good players and fitted them into their successful system, and sometimes these good players became great, Keegan, Rush and Dalgliesh particularly. That's why they dominated a system of replacing and refreshing the squad. United did it with Robson, Ince, and Keane to pick on one particular position that kept the results coming by keeping the system going.

Liverpool didn't operate like a modern day Real Madrid outbidding and buying up all the available top talent whether they needed it, or were taking a gamble on it, or sometimes cynically making sure that no one else could have it.

A squad of Galacitico's works two ways, you have the best talent and your rivals by definition can't, whether that translates into having the best team or not is of course another matter

Well ok, perhaps my argument isn't perfect, but you know what I mean.

On the argument of buying players in as the basis of their success, I would have thought that Shankley was the most important factor rather than buying power.

The players Liverpool signed were signing for a club which already had the infrastructure in place. It's no good signing all the best players if the club isn't run properly.

Look at Real Madrid when Beckham and the other galaticos were there, weren't they unsuccessful in winning trophies.

Correct... the first liverpool manager to buck this trend was Dalglish.. he brought in the likes of Beardsley and Barnes, who were the best players in the league at the time... This worked for a while, but did untold damage long term.

Liverpools long successful era certainty wasn't built on buying the 'best' players around.

Signing the likes of Beardsley and Barnes didn't do untold damage long term.

What did untold damage was when they stopped signing the best players, and as their ageing greats left they were replaced by guys like Saunders, Walters, Thomas, Stewart, Ruddock and Nigel Clough. These were all players who were decent but not in the top tier, so Liverpool became a club that was decent but not top tier.

History would have been different if Liverpool had been in for guys like Gascoigne, Pallister, Ian Wright, Keane, Shearer etc.

I think there is an art in timing when it comes to signing the best players around. You have to spot who is about to become really good, and sign then them: Alex Ferguson is a master at this, and Wenger in his early years at Arsenal. Players who are already galacticos don't always have the same success when they move clubs. Chelsea got burned with Shevchenko and Torres and I wouldn't be surprised if the same happens with Rooney.

Well you have provided the solution to your own problem, you don't need to sign all those expensive world class players and break the salary cap. As you say, you simply identify those players that are going to be world class and sign them young.

They are still expensive though because the price of a player is based on his future value over time (including resale value), so a young player showing a lot of promise will be expensive.

To bring this back to rugby, we did well with guys like Briers, Westwood and Bridge, getting them when they were just potential with question marks over how good they will be, and they turned out to be great investments.

Tony Smith has gone for guys like Atkins, Myler and Ratchford but we had to pay good money for Myler and Ratchford especially. Still they could turn out to be good investments over time.

It's like investing in any asset, only rarely will you get someone picking up an asset for nothing that nobody knows about (eg Dougie Laughton finding Offiah in lower division RU), on the whole the market has a fair bit of information about what is likely to be a good investment, but you need the means and the business sense to know when to strike out and take a risk.

Obviously if you produce assets like that in your own Academy its an advantage but even there risky decisions need to be taken to shift out experienced players and take a punt on the younger guy, Daryl Powell did a lot of path clearing before TS arrived at Leeds, and Ferguson did it at the end of the 94/95 season at United to open the door for his kids. But the kids have to be good enough. Wenger did it in the late 2000s with Arsenal but they dropped in standard and then everyone says you need to sign experience.

Right, so you 'spot the players that are going to be really good and sign them', which by definition other managers have not twigged and are therefore not expensive. But then you say they are expensive, because ' the price of a player is based on his future value, so a young player will be expensive'.

Call me picky, but you seem to be contradicting yourself here. Are these players that are going to be top class, expensive, or cheap ?

And do we need Bobby to help explain how all this fits into the infrastructure ?

They are likely to be expensive. I'm not talking about spotting unknowns when they are 17.

I mean signing the top players, when they are on the way up and not yet reached their peak. To use Alex Ferguson as an example, think Pallister, Ince, Keane, Cole, Ferdinand, Ronaldo, Vidic. Some of those players cost big money, but they were all players that still had lots of improvement in them, which would take place at United. The only time really he tried to sign a galactico at his peak was Veron who didn't quite fit in. You could use examples from Wenger at Arsenal too with Henry, Pires, Ljungberg, Campbell, all players of high potential but at the time they signed they were not the greats they would become in the next few years.

Similar to Leeds signing Harris from us - he won them the Challenge Cup and lifted them to the next level, and Saints signing Sculthorpe from us who went on to be the best player in SL for many years.

This started off by me saying if you want to be successful you have to sign the best and then Uncle Rico pointed out that just signing Galacticos doesn't work, so I was saying thats the signing strategy you need.

Salford, as a club with 'new money' will probably start off by doing the opposite, signing former top players on their way down as these are the players most likely to go there. Young and hungry players will see it as a gamble to join a club that might not live up to the hype and they could waste an important point of their careers not competing for trophies (like Martin Gleeson did with us). Older players will sense a chance to get big money. Salford will still gain though, because having Morley and a load of ex Saints players running around will be a big improvement on the garbage they have had in recent seasons. But they won't be competing for trophies with these guys.

If you want to discuss that Swiss-bankathon, corrupt, money-laundering, sexist apology for a 'sport' that is Wendyball have the decency to do so on the 'other sports' thread and leave us to talk on here about rugby.

And why should anyone take any notice of you? Most of your posts seem to have the childish reference to "wendyball" in them.

Why is it called wendyball?

Assuming asguardian doesn't like the sexism involved in football what is the issue with it being a sport more suited to females?

Of course a real mans sport like rugby league wouldn't get wendys playing it.

Don't expect you to read all my posts but I think you'll find that very few of them discuss Wendyball. Several forum mods have cut short even fleeting references by me to other sports with an admonishment to go to the 'other sports' forum. Hijacking a 'short turnround' thread to go on at length about Premier League soccer ( if you prefer another term ) is well out of order.

It's a reference to 'Wendyhouse': an artificial structure surprisingly popular and amazingly durable though in reality likely to collapse at any moment. As for sexist: Sepp Blatter - I rest my case.

Football is not likely to collapse at any moment, it has a fan base and appeal across the world.

Fair point about Sepp Blatter though. I wish the football governing bodies would get rid of these type of officials and appoint someone like Nigel Wood or Maurice Lindsay to stamp corruption out of the game.

It's doing a bloody good job of tempting fate, though! Sepp makes RL officials look like saints.

Quote ="sally cinnamon"Football is not likely to collapse at any moment, it has a fan base and appeal across the world. Fair point about Sepp Blatter though. I wish the football governing bodies would get rid of these type of officials and appoint someone like Nigel Wood or Maurice Lindsay to stamp corruption out of the game.'" You are right about Maurice. He is a very moral, warm hearted man that would never allow money to get in the way of doing the right thing. Remember the compassionate way he dealt with our own Mike Gregory when he was coaching. news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_l ... 826386.stm

Quote ="sally cinnamon"Football is not likely to collapse at any moment, it has a fan base and appeal across the world. Fair point about Sepp Blatter though. I wish the football governing bodies would get rid of these type of officials and appoint someone like Nigel Wood or Maurice Lindsay to stamp corruption out of the game.'" You are right about Maurice. He is a very moral, warm hearted man that would never allow money to get in the way of doing the right thing. Remember the compassionate way he dealt with our own Mike Gregory when he was coaching. news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_l ... 826386.stm

Reading that BBC article again made me notice the fact that I had missed the very clever quote in the box at middle page;

"We honoured every penny of our contractual obligations"


Just about sums it up really. Mike died around 18 months later.

I do try and read all of your posts (post joining) as I prefer to get a balanced view on things. Indeed, I can sometimes be swayed by a decent argument to change my view. In short, I would like to think tnat I am open minded.

Sometimes when conducting an argument it is useful to draw parallels with 'other sports' and football as a popular professional sport can provide decent material when talking about league systems, financial rewards, sponsorship TV rights, club v country to name but a few off the top of my head. It is hardly hijacking IMO.

Now if someone started a thread on a large transfer bid for say Rangi Chase and a poster leapt in immediately with never mind that Rooney to Chelsea for £40m is proper transfer deal then that would clearly be gainst the spirit of the forum and IMO the forum to some extent like our mixed crowds, is better served by a bit of common sense and self regulation.