pawsandclaws1
Well-known member
@2041 said in [Signing Suggestions & Rumours](/post/1116200) said:@Spud_Murphy said in [Signing Suggestions & Rumours](/post/1116191) said:Whilst we may not have Penrith’s junior nursery, we do have a fair amount of youngsters coming through and we always have had. We have a far better junior base than many of the top teams, though our retention hasn’t been all that flash.
This is the popular perception of the Tigers, but honestly for a big chunk of the past decade our production of juniors was pretty terrible. After Moses in 2014, the best juniors to have debuted with the Tigers are JAC, Marsters and Suli (I'm excluding Liddle, Mikaele and Talau for now as we really don't know what sort of careers they'll have).
That's not good over half a decade, especially for a club that depends on producing its own players. It doesn't ignore a host of solid first graders - the type of contributor every club needs - either.
In 2015 these juniors made their NRL debut for the Tigers: Delouise Hoeter, Kyle Lovett, Nathan Milone, Mainai Cherrington and Lamar Liolavave. 2016 was better (Addo-Carr and Liddle) but basically no-one else (hello JJ Felise). In 2017, we had some young signings from elsewhere (Twal, Eisenhuth) and our own juniors produced Marsters, Suli, Bayley Sironen and Jeremy Marshall-King. In 2018 we didn't debut a single club junior.
It is the quality of our juniors which we produce that provides hope for the future. Doueihi, Tatola, Papenhuyzen, Simona and Korobeite can be included as well. Add these to Woods, Tedesco, Moses, Brooks and the ones you have mentioned and we have a very competitive team.
Identification and retention need to be improved hugely. In addition, dumb decisions like getting rid of Moses only to replace him with Reynolds was an extremely poor decision. This has partly been obscured by Moses unpopularity but when you remove the emotion it was a piss poor decision.