Dorn, Caro, Channing, Sarginson, Colbon, Witt, Soward, Kaufusi, Lee, Wheeldon, Clubb, Bailey

There's nearly a full team of players who've appeared in Tony Rea's teams but have moved on to other Super League clubs. Who's improved outside the Broncos environment? Who's churning out pretty much the same performances? Who's gone downhill?

Early days yet, I grant you.

Caro is so far off the radar he might as well be a Malaysian air liner.

What's Temata up to these days?

Could he be any worse than some of our incumbents up front.

you cant really include Soward.
Witt seems to be holding his own though.
Pretty sure Karl Temata was involved with one of the WC squads cant remember which though and on coaching staff

Caro was mom against wakey according to league express.

Channing doing ok too

Should have been our hooker

Clubb and Sarginson doing ok at Wigan. Sarg has filled out a lot. Expect to see more of them next year

Dorn is still the same Dorn with the same strengths and weaknesses.

On the basis of one televised match, Kaufusi seems to be maintaining, or even improving on, his uncanny ability to make himself invisible.

Kaufusi sounds like he's a right Dynamo. But that i mean the illusionist.

(FB), Dixon, Channing, Sarginson, Caro, (SO), (SH), Clubb, (Hooker), Krasniqi, Cook, (2Row), LMS. + Bishay, D. Griffin, Dollapi, G. Griffin.

That would be a very interesting 17. With McMeeken, Bryan, Lovell, MCB, Macani, JOC, Wicks filling the squad.

Such a shame that the game down here is finally producing players in good numbers and yet it's all too late for this club.

The players weren't necessarily produced too late. The junior development has been a real positive for some time. What the club has lacked is the strategy and management to use this to advance the club. Phil Jones should have been given an offer he couldn't refuse. Instead we kept the stooges on the payroll.

This^^^^^^^^^^with bells on!

Funny thing is, is that I hear from over here for years people saying the young players don't know the basics.

So who was responsible for training the kids coming through?

They seem to have a better idea of the basics when they play at junior level.

Are you saying our player development has not been a positive ? Can you name an area of the club that has been more successful over recent years ?

Londoners are always going to develop at a different rate to northerners simply because RL is so new to people down here, our kids just don't have the "RL immersion" that a kid in Wigan or Leeds enjoys. Up there the game is discussed all the time, parents have played or at least watched the game themselves, all of that impacts upon the game awareness of young players.

I'd also suggest that some coaches find it easier to work with older players than youngsters who may be more unpredictable and in need of different things. One of the criticisms I held of Tony Rea in his previous spell was his treatment of younger players. Darrell Griffin has had a good career in SL, James Brooks likewise in union, Iain Morrison would have been a very good squad player for us, even Joe Mbu was treated poorly, and there were others too, but none of them lasted long at London. I always got the feeling Rea found it difficult to work with them and didn't have the patience needed. I think we're seeing the same right now with Mike Bishay who was dumped to the Skolars a week after winning MofM. Drinkwater has been dire and Farrar is never a stand off, but both of them seem locked into the team.

I think we get a bit carried away by any young London players that make it to SL. There's only a couple of players Id say are really good enough to play in a top 4 squad. Clubb and LMS. Nearly all other players have had too many weaknesses in their games. Maybe Mbu was pretty solid in his position too. Dixon and Sarginson are talked about very positively but I'm not sure either have the all round game they should have at their stage. I like watching Channing but Cas fans don't rate him despite his tries, claiming he lacks game awareness ('runs around like a headless chicken') and I like the look of Bishay but Rea obviously sees a problem there too.

Two things - firstly, a lot of what you've said about those players is down to them developing later because they come from an area with no history of producing players. They need handling in a different way because they're simply never going to be comparable to northerners at 20 years of age. Secondly, forget top 4 clubs, we're bottom of the league and every single one of the Londoners now playing up north would walk into our team.

A lot of the players coming through now started playing at a young age, so what's the problem? If junior RL isn't tough enough down there to produce SL quality players then we have a problem that needs solving, they need to play against more northern juniors more often or we need to improve the standard of junior RL in the south. You can't just shrug your shoulders and say 'we can't compete we're southern'.

We can compete at schools age. In the Cup Final curtain raiser last year a southern school absolutely battered the Castleford opponents.

I didn't say that in the slightest. What I said was that because RL is an alien sport to the kids down here they take longer to develop - which can be seen in something like game awareness which cannot be taught but comes from experience - and that needs to be taken into account when evaluating a 20 year old Londoner V his northern counterparts.

No, you are simply putting words in my mouth and saying I'm saying our junior dev has not been a positive, when I'm not.

If they have a better idea of the basics when they play at junior level, what more do they need to learn? Kids here know the basics before they play rep footy U16s.

Yep, agree. I see it here. It's in the blood more of NSW and QLD people than other states. So I totally get where you're coming from.

But, the RL dev people at London over the years have done a great job in spreading it around the schools of the South. If our kids are playing mini or mods from 5 years old, then there should be no difference to the North or Oz really. We have great people spreading the word and many volunteers coaching their hearts out. Maybe the RL itself should look at coaching qualifications and teach more as opposed to simply spreading the game? We're about 20 years on from SL starting and we have produced a handful of players who went on and played first grade. Mostly for London, but a few of us Suvverners, have now moved to the northern clubs. Which is positive.




Yeah, the coach is the one that has to make the hard calls about who they and only they deem is good enough to have a chance of playing. Not sure about the working with kids comment as Tony Rea was a school teacher when he played footy here. You will unfortunately always see a youngster being told they're not required to then go somewhere else and then kick on. A good example of that is James Maloney at the Roosters. He played one season in Jersey Flegg (U20s) for the bottom club, the North Sydney Bears in 2006 as no-one wanted him! He then was called up into reserve grade. Other clubs saw him and wanted him after that. He won a premiership and played Origin last year. So it makes you think about all the coaches that didn't want him before.

Our "success" in bringing through young players is often held up as an example of how things should be done. But I've no idea whether we've done a good job of it or not. Maybe we should have developed two or three times more youngsters than we have. Or maybe less, who knows?

But one thing is agreed by almost everybody who watches our games and then posts on here, and that's that none of our youth players comes into the first team squad showing good enough defensive capabilities. I can't think of one who has done.

Yeah, we have developed a culture in the south now thanks to the hard work of people that has meant we have been able to produce players that have moved on to first grade. How does one quantify the success? By the numbers of these kids? Or the numbers playing the game anyway. I like to think the latter as it produces the former.

I'm not having a go at the people who brought these people through, but is this defensive capabilities part of the "knowing the basics" I've heard about?

For the majority of them it doesn't seem to be tackling technique that's lacking, more the understanding of what's going on around them and being able to read the play in front of them. I think that's down to experience because the season down here is so short that a kid can easily play less than a dozen games in the summer, compared to a Wiganer playing three times as many games. Over a ten year development process that's a hell of a lot more experience for one player over another.