Sorry 2041 but the only valid analysis of recruitment and retention is to compare our top 30 to every other teams top 30\. And that is not pretty reading. If (and it’s a huge if) numbers 29 and 30 are top shelf experienced first graders, maybe, just maybe, we can agree we are improving in this area where we have failed for a long, long time.
I wholeheartedly agree that the club has been a basket case off the field. However, it can't go from basket case to model performer overnight, ie from a roster that legitimately couldn't be expected to finish outside the bottom four to a contender. The only fair question to ask is "are we improving?" I think recruitment over the past few months is at least a positive sign.
Actually if we think about it rationally the biggest problem is pretty clearly production of our own talent not recruitment. Other than one club that pretty much everyone assumes cheats the cap, nobody gets good purely by signing other teams' established first graders. It's bad cap strategy and all it means is you'll always be paying fair-to-high value. You need a mixture of home-grown talent on cheap contracts - and at the moment we have very little of that.
The people who say "we don't need more development players, we need established first grade talent" are completely missing the point. We are actually doing ok to well at recruiting the latter, at least in recent times. But we need both.
Agreed. After getting sick of being a development club we over compensated imo and stopped altogether.
The real tragedy was there was a window where the Tigers should have had the pieces in place. They produced, within a couple of years, a generational talent at fullback, a legitimately top-end halfback (albeit one who developed slower than might have been hoped) and a rep-calibre prop. Also Mitchell Moses.
Unfortunately, they made two fatal errors. One was loading the salary cap with back-ended deals that stopped them being able to recruit decent talent around that core. The second was being indecisive and not locking up those players well before they hit the open market. Oh, and a third: they put hopeless coaches in charge for several years.
At this point the club is trying to come back from rock bottom with basically nothing in the squad other than Brooks and possibly Liddle that represents both genuine top-end talent and doesn't take up at least a fair chunk of cap space. Blaming recruitment for not being able to bring in a dozen top-end first graders in the space of 12 months is like saying the windows are the reason your house is falling down when you chose to build it on a swamp.
