For you Father Ted

Since you don't listen to reason, frankly I am bored posting points.
This post is going off at so many tangents it's untrue.

Step back, ignore the trash being posted.

If you think the standards of RL has improved in this country over the last 15 years then I honestly despair.

The way to improve standards in ANY field, be it a certain profession, a certain vocation or indeed a sport is NOT to limit the earning power of it's participants. The CC does the opposite.

Again if you cannot see that simple point then there is no point in continuing the debate.


Oh and btw, re-read the posts. I didn't mention "300 players"

Certainly worked in banking.

Tell you what, why don't you limit the salaries of ALL banking staff to £50k and see what state the banking sector is left in.

The country would go bust, unable to pay out benefits to chavs.



Stupid analogy FTV.

It's your assertion that unlimited, unfettered earnings is the way forward in every walk of life. If you think bonus culture and greed chasing these unlimited earnings wasn't a factor in the banking crisis then, well . . . .

I would argue the contrary - that a defined and transparent pay scale is better and leads to better more long termist decisions.

But then everyone knows comparing sport directly to business is stupid, don't they?

The issue with the banks was the lack of proper regulation, nothing to do with wage levels.



Comparing sports to business is not stupid. However, the analogy that you used previously was.


Explain how a "defined and transparent" pay scale is better. Actually while you are at it, explain exactly what it is.


Btw the grammar in your "long termmist" line is awful. How on earth are we supposed to take your views on the relative similarities between RL and the banking sector seriously with a reply like that?

Quote ="Badwanger"So, what you are saying is that you've got no idea how good or otherwise these fringe players were, but yet you can readily state that the Saints fans' opinions about them are incorrect based solely upon blatantly biased reports on the Saints Heritage Site? Yet you happliy quoted from, as you put it, Saints sources that Vila was "a top quality player", yet you personally never rated him. Remember I too, have seen many greats in the red vee........ I suggest you read the link you posted again. www.saints.org.uk/saints.org.uk/ ... page_id=10 What a ludicrious suggestion! Bitter much? Matautia was primarily used in the second row hence why he was fourth choice centre. "Valuable interchange player" - that's a nothing statement. If he really was good, his "write up" would be far more descriptive like these; Tommy Martyn - a player which Wiganer's don't rate. www.saints.org.uk/saints.org.uk/ ... page_id=10 Paul Newlove www.saints.org.uk/saints.org.uk/ ... page_id=10 Anthony Sullivan www.saints.org.uk/saints.org.uk/ ... page_id=10 Also, remember Barry Ward? Is that recent enough for you? www.saints.org.uk/saints.org.uk/ ... page_id=10 Can you perhaps see now that there is quite a lot of misty-eyed biased towards Saints' ex-players (and rightly so)! Those biographies are written by Saints fans, not some random RL journalist. If Wigan, or any team in any sport for that matter, had such a website, then you would expect to have the same bias. Here's a challenge for you. Pick a past Saints player and bring to the fore your opinions of him, heck, even write a few things down if it helps. Then, look him up on the Heritage site and you will see a marked difference between YOUR opinion and that of the SAINTS FAN's write up. Go on, try it. I would if I could remember where they were held! No, we said that they were NL1 standard players who would struggle to get into a current SL side. There is a BIG difference.'" First off, I'm not sure why you kept posting the same link (to Sonny Nickle???) Though now you mention it the early 90s side he played in was pretty handy, certainly in the 92/93 season. (Come to think of it, that Saints side was a better side than the 2006 side and the 2009 side. Thanks for reminding me.) Yes I didn't think Matautia was a great player. So? You/FTV have said he was rubbish/NL1 standard. Clearly thats not the case. As for Anderson, he appears to have been a competent squad player. All teams have them, even Wigan in the early 90s. Saints have them now. Yet you argue that he and others, forming what would appear to be the majority of Saints double winning squad, were only NL1 standard. Bizarre.

Quote ="Badwanger"So, what you are saying is that you've got no idea how good or otherwise these fringe players were, but yet you can readily state that the Saints fans' opinions about them are incorrect based solely upon blatantly biased reports on the Saints Heritage Site? Yet you happliy quoted from, as you put it, Saints sources that Vila was "a top quality player", yet you personally never rated him. Remember I too, have seen many greats in the red vee........ I suggest you read the link you posted again. www.saints.org.uk/saints.org.uk/ ... page_id=10 What a ludicrious suggestion! Bitter much? Matautia was primarily used in the second row hence why he was fourth choice centre. "Valuable interchange player" - that's a nothing statement. If he really was good, his "write up" would be far more descriptive like these; Tommy Martyn - a player which Wiganer's don't rate. www.saints.org.uk/saints.org.uk/ ... page_id=10 Paul Newlove www.saints.org.uk/saints.org.uk/ ... page_id=10 Anthony Sullivan www.saints.org.uk/saints.org.uk/ ... page_id=10 Also, remember Barry Ward? Is that recent enough for you? www.saints.org.uk/saints.org.uk/ ... page_id=10 Can you perhaps see now that there is quite a lot of misty-eyed biased towards Saints' ex-players (and rightly so)! Those biographies are written by Saints fans, not some random RL journalist. If Wigan, or any team in any sport for that matter, had such a website, then you would expect to have the same bias. Here's a challenge for you. Pick a past Saints player and bring to the fore your opinions of him, heck, even write a few things down if it helps. Then, look him up on the Heritage site and you will see a marked difference between YOUR opinion and that of the SAINTS FAN's write up. Go on, try it. I would if I could remember where they were held! No, we said that they were NL1 standard players who would struggle to get into a current SL side. There is a BIG difference.'" First off, I'm not sure why you kept posting the same link (to Sonny Nickle???) Though now you mention it the early 90s side he played in was pretty handy, certainly in the 92/93 season. (Come to think of it, that Saints side was a better side than the 2006 side and the 2009 side. Thanks for reminding me.) Yes I didn't think Matautia was a great player. So? You/FTV have said he was rubbish/NL1 standard. Clearly thats not the case. As for Anderson, he appears to have been a competent squad player. All teams have them, even Wigan in the early 90s. Saints have them now. Yet you argue that he and others, forming what would appear to be the majority of Saints double winning squad, were only NL1 standard. Bizarre.

I can't believe anyone would come up with such nonsense and post it as a serious point. Wigan lost in the cup to Salford so that proves they were not a great team? Can you name me a RL team that does not get beaten every now and again by a team of a much lower standard? Even great teams have off days and more lowly teams raise their games. That is what makes team sport what it is. Unpredictable.

Dave

It wasn't even worth replying to. I can't believe you did.

You're right.

Looking back, there was little point in my replying to posts such as those in which Saints fans described the bulk of their '96 double winning squad as "rubbish" or "NL1 standard".

The Saints' fans posts on the last few pages on this thread speak for themselves.

There really is no need to respond to what are patently absurd posts and I won't be doing so in future.

He was most definitely rubbish. In fact, he was a total liability. I doubt any Wigan fans who actually remember him would disagree.



You're saying he was a valuable squad member in 1996, I'm saying he only played 2 games and was at Leigh a couple of years later never to be seen again. One is opinion (from a person who admits to not even remembering watching him play

) and one is fact.

A lot of that squad wouldn't get within a sniff of a top 6 team in this years SL, let alone the champions. A lot would be in the Championship (as many of them were a couple of years later).

More nonsense. Matautia wasn't rubbish. He may have had disciplinary issues and could have done with some better coaching to sort this out but rubbish he wasn't. I didn't rate him that highly but to say he was NL1 standard is ridiculous.

I find it frankly bizarre that you can say that - in 1996, the season in which he was voted young player of the year (not my opinion, the opinion of lots of Saints fans!) - Anderson was "rubbish" or "NL1 standard". He may have gone on to Leigh later on but Saints obviously thought he could do a job for them as a squad player for a couple of seasons.

With any squad, some players will not be as good as the bulk of the first team, that's the nature of a squad. Even Wigan in the early 90s had squad players who weren't especially talented.

Saints have a number of players in their squad now who will leave over the next few years for NL1 or maybe leave pro rugby entirely. It doesn't mean they are rubbish now or not up to SL standard at this moment in time.

To produce a long list of players, what appears to be the majority of your 1996 squad and say they were "rubbish" and would only be good enough for NL1 is just absurd.

I'm not going to respond to any more of your ludicrous posts and would suggest that no-one else does.

Sorry about that it must not have cut and pasted correctly. Mea culpa.



Any credibility you had has just disappeared if you honestly think that the Saints side of 1992/93 were better than the all conquering side of 2006!!!!



So why quote the "Saints sources" opinions if you did not agree with them?
You would not readily quote "Saints sources" if they said that Wellens was better than Radlinski or readily quote those same "Saints sources" which extol the virtues of Tommy Martyn (for example).



I'd say that myself, FTV (plus others) are in a far better position to judge the relative merits/flaws of particular players in that era rather than someone who, by their own admission, knows little of the Saints squad in 1996, and is instead heavily reliant on a misty-eyed biased report by a Saints fan on their heritage site.



Yes, he was competent (as was Pickavance, Morley, Matautia etc) - nothing more. Obviously the years of dross at Wigan have lowered your standards sufficiently that you now think "competent" is good enough for a regular SL place.

There is an easy way to show it hasn't.

People need to ask questions like this.

Do we currently have a player of the quality of Ellery Hanley playing 13 at any SL club? Answer, no clearly not.

You then repeat the above exercise for the top players who were his contemporaries and ask the same question. Virtually every time you will come to the conclusion the player from the Hanley era was better than what we have running around today particularly British players.

You can even do it with some players who were not considered top class at the time but merely pretty good such as Henderson Gill and Des Drummond. Do we have any wingers up to their standard running around at the moment? I don't think we do.

Do this for players like Schofield, J Davies, Andy Gregory and so on and they were all IMO better than the so called top players we have today in their positions. Now Long's talent is on the wane who is the best 7 on SL? Some have said Dobson. Comparing him to Andy Gregory is ridiculous, he doesn't come close.

Dave

Apart from Hanley, all those players you named have their equal playing in SL today but, for the purposes of debate, suppose you are correct. How does that prove that the standards in SL are slipping due to the SC when none of those players actually played in that era?

A better measure is surely the exercise which we have already done, namely a direct comparison between the top side(s) which contested the first SL and those top side(s) of last year.

I know I shouldn't reply... but that's far too tempting.

Let's try Jonathan Davies, who is his equal in SDL today?

BTW, I'm amused that you found my comment about your 92/93 side so controversial. It was meant to be a little provocative: I do think you Saints fans have a real issue with pre-SL rugby league.

I remember that side holding Wigan to an 8-8 draw at CP in front of 30,000 fans, in a season that went down to points difference. Any side that could push a Wigan team with a squad as powerful as we had at the time (see below) all the way MUST have been a great side.

[urlhttp://wigan.rlfans.com/fusion_pages/index.php?page_id=316[/url

Feel free to post the 2006 Saints squad alongside that one any day!

Disrespect your own history all you want, but the Saints side that year was one of the all-time great RL sides, in any other era it would have been extremely successful.

The real tragedy is that you failed to build from there and had such a disappointing 93-94 season, but that doesn't detract from the achievements of that great 92-93 side, bitter though your disappointment must be, you owe it to your own club and your own former players not to airbrush them out of history in some stalinist rewrite.

He was mediocre at best.

FWIW my arugment about the salary cap is primarily to do with me wanting to have a competitive league. I believe the best way forward for our game is to grow the Super League competition. I believe that the best way to do this is to have a competitive and thus entertaining competition because people will come through the turnstiles to watch their team if they believe they have a chance of winning. It is in the best interests of our competition to have that. I believe that we should concentrate on growing Super League, first and foremost. That should be our priority.

I don't believe that removing the salary cap will allow us to do that. I understand the other arguments about adjusting it and there may be some merit in some of those cases but removing the cap will undo all the good work that has been done. This year's competition has to be the most evenly matched I've experienced. I haven't counted but I would imagine that I've seen more exciting and entertaining matches at this stage of the season than during any other season I've watched RL in.

Matches are closer this season sometimes because teams cancel each other out, playing percentages, not because we are seeing better rugby.

I am not going to get started on this thread though, its an endless subject which will never reach a conclusion. There is no proof that the game would be better without the SC or that it will be amazing if we give it a few more years.

At the end of that day I love watching my team, and I think our game is great. The sport will take off once more people come through the gates.

That may well be the case. I'd also suggest it's because the playing talent is more evenly spread across the competition. It's unlikely that one team is going to supply more than ten players for the England team this year and IIRC there was a representative from every team in the NRL in Wednesday's Origin clash thanks to the NRL salary cap.

Does that not just mean less effort is put into youth development though? For example if everyone could spend as much as they wanted, a youth system would be wise as you wouldnt be able to sign young players from other teams like Hudds have done with a few of ours (no offence to hudds it was great initiative signing those players) but although thats spreads talent around, it just makes it easier to get hold of these players.

I think mediocre super league player is probably a fair description, given his disciplinary issues.



In an ideal world I wouldn't want any kind of spending restriction. Unfortunately RL clubs have shown time and time again that they are incapable of controlling their spending. I actually agree that we need some form of financial controls; I don't think though that the current arrangements work very well, lots of clubs have got into financial difficulties in the SC era.

As to the level playing field argument, this is one season, way into the SC era, shouldn't it have been have already brought about a level playing field, if it was ever going to work?

There are studies that have looked into the effectiveness of a SC and found it not to be effective at promoting competition. E.g.

[urlhttp://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/08/25/1030053009801.html[/url

(I accept that direct comparisons with the NRL aren't possible, the structures of the game and player base etc are different over there, but it does make interesting reading.)

In any event, what the SC doesn't do at the moment is encourage clubs to grow. We've created a stagnant competition (I don't accept that fans just want close matches, United get huge attendances when they play against lesser clubs they are expected to (and usually do) thrash, people want to see a quality product and star players too, that's probably more important).

If games are closer its because almost all teams are mediocre. To be honest I'd accept that to some extent IF more stars were coming through, sprinkled through the teams and this gave us a real chance to close the gap on the Aussies a bit. We really need to revitalise international competition.

But the stars just aren't there in the numbers they used to be. (Saints are one of the few clubs who are still regularly producing world class players (e.g. Roby and Graham), this isn't about criticising Saints.).

The really talented players are very thin on the ground, strength in depth has always been GB/England's problem but it is worse than its been since the early 80s.

I dread to think what will happen when the current England side meets New Zealand, let alone Australia.

I'd like to see clubs able to spend a bit more, provided they have sound business plans (which would approved by an independent auditor at the start of each season and then monitored in the same way that the live cap is monitored), particularly on young players. I think they've had a particularly raw deal from the SC. Players generally have lost out due to the SC - especially as it has not even been increased in line with inflation, let alone average earnings), but there are many talented young players being paid a pittance in pro sport terms and you wonder how many of them drift away from RL or don't even get to the first rung of the ladder. We need to reward and celebrate success, not be developing a culture of mediocrity (with Eddie and Stevo et al hyping up players who would have been fairly average 10 or 20 years ago.)

But the clubs that have the youth systems get the pick of the better players. Huddersfield may well have picked up Robinson, Wild and Brown, but Wigan have kept the better players in Tomkins, O'Loughlin and Hock, for example.

If you're relying on other people's youth systems you will always end up with the second rate players discarded by those clubs.

If everyone could spend what they wanted clubs with the most money could cherry pick whoever they wanted when contracts came to an end, very few professional players will turn down massive pay rises. In that case it's even less likely that you would have a decent youth system, why would you bother when you could buy up anyone you wanted? Taking the case of football, just how many good youngsters have come through the top 4 teams from start to finish in the last 10 years? How many are there that aren't nearing 30 that haven't been bought in? None.

How can they have been in the first team without nearing thirty after 10 years. Its kinda narrowing it down.

Put it this way, if you have a team of allstars - at a cost - your youth players benefit and learn from them to develop quicker. This is when your youth team becomes top class, providing only top class players for the 1st team.

Looking at football for example:

Scholes
Giggs
Gary Neville
Foster
Terry
Gerrard
Carragher

What I mean is, none of them have produced anything near a top class player in the last 10 years, as their ability to buy has increased their youth production has slowed.

All the players produced by the top 4 clubs that are any good (Foster is average at best, as are Brown and Evans), are nearing or are over 30.

Given that JD swapped and changed from FB to C, take your pick between Gidley, Webb, Senior or Wellens.



That's rich. It is you who has a problem with SL!



Aye, I was there and Saints were robbed thanks to certain Mr Holdsworth gifting Wigan two points for Hunte being offside when Saints had the ball!




And what will that achieve apart from you saying that Wigan player X is better than Saints player Y and me saying the opposite? When, in reality we both only saw the opposition team a small fraction of the time compared to the amount of times which we saw our own team play. So neither of us can therefore give an accurate assessment let alone an unbiased one!

However, having watched over 90% of the games from both those season, I can say with 100% certainty that the 2006 Saints team was a class apart from the Saints team of 1992/93. Sure, the backs were comparable (I'd still give 2006 the edge) but the 2006 forwards were immense compared to their 1992/93 counterparts.

Also, what you need to remember is that the 1992/93 season was played in Winter (which is a great leveller) and when defences were only 5m apart therefore giving the advantage to the defending team. In 2006, the game was played on faster, harder pitches with a 10m defensive line.



I'm disrespecting nothing. It was a very good Saints side but it's laughable to compare it to the team of 2006.



Or perhaps you could say that the 1992/93 season was a season where that squad over-achieved and in the following years they found their level?