That's how the Roosters do it yeah?
I would suggest most of what we did for the first 15 years was develop NRL players....
I don't classify 3/20 odd seasons in the finals as "Success"
- Winning the comp once is massive...
Having a chance to win it every year (Even every other year)
is just as massive...
Not only that, It creates success and players that want to stay.
I've mentioned it twice now, You claim it's the "only way"
Why then, Have we been utter shite for the majority of the time we were developing NRL players....
Say.... 2000 - 2017....
Why hasn't it worked? We've bought through some crackers!!
Generational players.
We're not even an average side...
We've made the finals 3 times in 23 seasons!!
THREE!!
The Roosters are a unique case, but they have developed much more FG quality than we have. It's not only the local kids, it's recruiting teenagers, it's throwing resources into S&C, providing support for growing kids in a cut-throat world. It's also recruiting those that slip through the gaps - guys like Stefano. We should be signing two or three of these guys every year whilst we're supposedly rebuilding.
We have had intermittent success with development. The 05 crew obviously - juxtaposed with some canny recruitment. That also led into the 10/11 team, which probably should have at least made a GF is not won the comp. The years in between were a waste of time given some bad luck with injuries, but mostly due to poor recruitment around the core (no better example than Morris replacing Prince).
We then had the so-called 'big 4' group. We (again) stuffed around with the recruitment around them, stuffed up their retention, and after that, basically gave up on the development side of things.
As you mentioned in your earlier post, we've had 2/10ths of fark-all come through since then, which is a complete embarrassment. I think Seyfarth is the only WM/BT junior to debut between that crop and the recent guys like Matamua (correct me if wrong).
That we've now got the figureheads making a big song and dance about pathways and development as a game-changer is pathetic - it should be the minimum expectation for an NRL club, especially one with a decent junior catchment like ours.
We need to coach our kids better, get them prepared for life in the NRL.
We need to recruit kids from outside our catchment, and make sure that we're keeping the good ones from inside.
We'll never win a comp with purely local juniors, but if we're developing multiple waves of young kids coming through, it'll make the recruitment at the top level 10x easier.
For one, it's a lot easier to plan for the medium/long term when you have a strong depth chart coming through. Souths are a good example re: Illias vs Reynolds - they were able to let the latter go with confidence in the younger guy coming through. Thus saving heaps ($600k?) in their cap which can be spent strengthening elsewhere.
They've also got a young hooker in waiting for when Cook's contract is up next year.
So we absolutely need to recruit good FGers, and we should be going after stars at the moment given our cap situation. But it's going to be hard to sell the vision to anyone when the powers that be have been sitting on their hands for 10 years.
Hopefully we've finally woken up and realised that we're miles behind.
