I 'm remembering a period pre Moran when were ok, and winnning stuff and competing with a top Wigan side in tight games, finals, and Semi finals.... a time When Our Chairman Shelled out on Boyd Tamati Johnson Rathbone Andy Gregory, and Phil BLake all in a short space of time.............

and considering Salford spend most of their time Laughing at Swinton who have a trophy haul much more impressive than most clubs and certainly Salfords....then what exactly does "some people have short memories mean"

Agree 100% with biscuit on this... a few bad years for a club with over 130 years of history hardly constitutes comparisons with a club like Salford.

All teams have had bad periods... The biggest club in English rugby, Wigan, had to break the rules to avoid relegation.

Warrington, as a club, has never been in the same bracket as Salford, that's just the way it is.

The reality is that they do not have a rich history, or a fan base.

I dont resent Koukash coming into rugby league and waving his cash around (when he finally does)... infact, i think its great for the game. I just think he may well end up wishing he had spent it on another small club. One that he has a fighting chance of making a proper club out of..... like Hull KR or St Helens.

don't get me wrong i'm not saying we weren't at times a decent side since i have been a fan (started going in 85) because there were some great days and even whole seasons that stick out (bearing in mind i was only 2 in 85 so some of the early days are a bit hazy!)

but its not that long since salford and us were in exactly the same boat and im thinking about 2002

they got relegated but my memory of that year is we were abysmal and i was terrified we would go down because for most of the year i thought we deserved it

since then we have had unbroken access to SL money

we got the new stadium but almost didn't... they got theirs eventually but it was put in a daft location

we got our sugar daddy 9 years ago, they have only just got theirs

what i'm saying is there is a very fine between a club getting on the upward spiral and going in the opposite direction and there are some important individual incidents that could have gone either way for us which may have made the story very different

so i think wire fans should have better grace when talking about salford because their recent history isn't so different from ours and it could quite easily have been roles reversed

Completely different scenarios, we got our sugar daddy after we got up off our s and sourced a solution for a new stadium where other clubs buried their heads in teh sand and ignored it.

We got our stadium, and cos of the revenue streams available from that that weren't at wilderspool, the club got itself in a very good financial position, after that occurred THEN mr moran became our sugar daddy.

Salford have got a stadium that they part own and get apparently get less income from, therefore it didn't strengthen them and as you saw last year, things got much worse.

As has been said above, its no disrespect to say through the years we're a bigger club than they are, its a fact,

It was said when loukash joined, it was a weird acquisition, as they're not a traditionally huge club, they haven't got a historic fanbase to try and call back on, it literally would be starting from scratch, which is an even more massive task than say moran had, or lenagan had when they joined wire or wigan.

As far as I am aware Salford City Reds/Red Devils do not own ANY part of the stadium. They are joint tenants with Sale RU. The City Council and Peel are both developers and owners within a Stadium Mangement Company. This might just be the clue as to why the 'good' Doctor is involved..Property Development?

There is nothing wrong with maximising your opportunities in business, who knows a successful development programme, or TV channel, or commercial moonflights might supplement the rugby league aspect of his bid for world domination. On the other hand, the rugby league club might just be a secondary key to unlock all the other stuff and if so that would be a shame as it could leave our neighbours vulnerable when Barton Airport becomes the new Cape Canaveral

i did think that about the stadium ownership, wasn't 100% though so didn't want to say it if i was wrong. (so i said the other thing, which was also wrong)

Hey no worries Mr C, we will probably have Stanley on any minute telling us that we are both wrong. Come to think of it if the commercial moonflights ever take off Stanley would get my vote for Salford's first astronaut

i think he's busy this morning on their forum, having to deal with whitehead turning down their transfer offer.

Clearly having a sugar daddy isn't the be all and end all.

Since Salford have come into money allegedly. Most have the Salford fans I know have turned into right whoppers. I'll believe the revolution at Salford when I see it with my own eyes. At the moment it's all pie sky

out of curiosity can I have some examples.

Only j/king, don't bite. Mate Salford fans are just happy to have a club and be linked to players again. No harm done just enjoying the ride

I agree we've never been in the same boat as Salford have been recently / currently are. Our darkest days were probably 2002 when yes, we were dreadful and actually I thought we were the worst team in SL for most of the season. However - our average attendance that year was 6,270! And we had a pretty handy team the year before and year after. We have never spent year after year at the bottom end of the table, with pitiful crowds and facing winding up orders. We've had tricky times, but never in that bracket. And as others have pointed out, pre-Moran we were already much stronger than Salford are likely to be in the near future.

Has Eliot Whitehead backed out of his Salford deal and gone to Cats?

Whitehead has indeed signed for Le Frogs...Perhaps somebody has whispered in his shell that Koukash isn't what he appears to be.

Go on then,I'll play.
What is it he appears to be AND what is he ?

Maybe its Koukash no cash

He never agreed to go, Salford stupidly announced they had agreed a deal before even talking to him

this would appear to be totally out of character from the new owner.

i refuse to believe such a thing happened

OI WHO THREW THAT BOTTLE ???

I remember us being in a similar situation in our early days of being cashed up. We were going to sign Matt Orford for about a year, then he turned us down and joined Manly. Then we were going to sign Michael Monaghan who was Manly's existing no.7 but he turned us down preferring to play hooker and stay at Manly than join us.

So we ended up with...Michael Sullivan.

In the end it turned out well for us, Monaghan became a class act at hooker and had a few years under his belt before he came to do that role for us, Orford ended up at Bradford after he was past his best and injury prone. But we did have this period of players being able to use us as leverage in contract negotiations whilst we didn't have the influence of a trophy-contending club. Salford are in this situation now.

Fundamental difference: Press speculation/Owner comments.

Absolutely. We learnt our lesson after announcing Neil Kelly was going to join us as coach and then didn't and I think there were a couple of overseas players being talked about (not big names) that didn't come in the end either. I remember Paul Cullen emphasising the importance of not talking about signings until they were 100% and I don't think we've done it since. We certainly never claimed Matt Orford was on his way. Whearas Salford have been doing this for years - Steve Simms was particularly guilty of doing it.

Once we started improving our squad, it was steady, sustained year on year improvement. Whatever people think of Cull as a coach, its hard to criticise his signings. Virtually every single one contributed to improving us and very, very few if any were a complete failure. The squads that won the 2009 and 2010 cups were pretty much what he had built.

Joel Monaghan signing being a good case in point.

Everyone thought he was going to... CAS of all clubs?

Cullen was obsessive about details of targets not being leaked either because he didn't want to alert other clubs or because he didn't want the club to have egg on its face if it didn't materialise. It's not always possible because often stuff gets put in the public domain by agents who want to bid up their player's value: the Myler deal for instance was well known about. I expect Elliot Whitehead has a very proactive agent, but I do think Koukash is a bit naive. Both agents and press have a vested interest in getting owners or coaches to comment, at the moment both groups are taking advantage of Koukash.

You can't always keep offers secret but Warrington have done better than most at keeping some deals under wraps. With Vinnie Anderson, the story in the papers was about a race between Bradford and London to sign him, and then suddenly Warrington announced the deal. Matt King caught the press on the hop too. The big Aussie signings mooted in summer 2007 were Michael Monaghan being chased by us and Hull, and Matt King being chased by Wigan and Leeds. I don't think many had Warrington down for landing both.

And of course the biggest secret operation in transfer history: Andrew Johns.

There were a few others that didn't materialise: if I remember we tried to go for Brent Kite and Sean O'Loughlin around the time we got Gleeson and Fa'afili, but those didn't make the papers. Also seem to remember we were in for Francis Meli too. I think his agent revealed that one to the papers.

And another good one, remember that off season when Nat Wood was supposed to be joining Wigan, I remember hearing (from a pretty reliable source) that we were trying to clear a quota spot to sign Brad Fittler, he had just retired from the Roosters and we wanted him to do a season with us. The story I heard was that Fittler came back saying he didn't think he could do himself justice and didn't want to finish his career just taking the money and not being up to it, which was fair play to him. Never knew whether that was all true but I liked the story and it was at a time when we were very active for the big names.

I did enjoy the time when Cullen issued a statement saying we were not signing Adrian Morley, and he simply would not allow our fans and sponsors to be misled in this way...sure we weren't.



I don't agree with this bit. Cullen signed a lot of players that were past their best and did not have the same impact for us that they did other clubs: Cardiss, Swann, Kohe-Love, Reardon, Vinnie Anderson.

The likes of Rauhihi and Bracek would go in the category of OK but not quite what we were expecting. The one that was a really failed signing was Michael Sullivan.

And other players that started well but then faded: Grose, Lima, Parker. Arguably Martin Gleeson could go in that category too: although I was always a big fan, after his first couple of seasons his best performances were for GB/England and the occasional good one for us and he was treading water a lot of the time.

I also think it was a mistake to have released John Wilshere so soon as he went on to be a decent player with Salford and Leigh and would have been better than Richie Barnett.

Cullen's good signings come in two categories: the ones that were good even when Cullen was here: Morley, Gleeson, Hicks, Forshaw, Fa'afili, Leikvoll, and the ones that didn't do much when he was here but came good after Cullen had gone: Bridge, Monaghan, King, Louis Anderson, Johnson, Grix (in the case of the last two, they were injured a lot while he was here).

Not sure I'd include Logan Swann or Toa Kohe-Love in that list. Both were fine players. TKL came back on a smaller contract than he had been on at Hull as his injury problems were well documented. He still did a decent job at that time.

You're right about Wilshere, who never got a fair crack of the whip from fans or coaches and went on to be very good for Salford and Leigh as you say.

The list was saying they were past their best and didn't have the same impact they did for us as they did for other clubs.

Logan Swann at his best (eg around the time we tried to get him as a replacement for Kevin Campion) would have been pushing a world XIII. For us he was ok, no more. Toa's best was around 99-01 for us first time round when he was the best strike centre in SL. He wasn't second time round, although he had cut the high tackles out of his game.