The Virtual Terrace • Re: Knowles
Mild Rover wrote:
In any given year, for there only to be only three or four teams with a realistic chance of being champions is fine. If you extend that out to a decade or two, it feels problematic. That isn’t the fault of Wigan, Leeds or Saints, and grudging credit to them, but it is their problem as much as anybody else’s. This doesn’t feel like a cycle anymore, it feels permanent - and that requires some challenging adjustments.
I have been reflecting on this a lot this morning. I have seen a lot of conversation about changing the salary cap, as well as changing the structures around the academy to try and break the triopoly we seem to have created.
There is no doubt that Saints/ Leeds/ Wigans dominance starts with their academy, and it’s Saints vs Leeds in the academy final today as if to demonstrate the point. The fact that there’s always another player to call upon gives such a major advantage, and players like Bennison at Saints for example will cost a pittance on the cap (if at all) and yet plays a major role in their continued success. If I recall correctly, there was an article a while ago that said before he went to Aus, Wigan were paying Joe Burgess £8k a year.
This means that the trio are getting so much more value on their cap, and to coax someone away takes another team paying big overs for them. Coote going to Hull KR was lauded as a demonstrable evidence the salary cap was working, but I would argue the exact opposite - it demonstrated how much more teams outside of the winners circle had to pay to get a player whose another year older and was already replaced by Saints with another kid (Welsby in this case) ready to perform to the same standard or more.
Now in the past we have had similarly dominant teams picked apart by the NRL (thinking specifically the Wigan team of the early 2010s) which kept “balance” and the difference between this Saints team and Wigan in the 2010s is that they have somehow repeatedly seen off NRL bids for Welsby/ Dodd/ Walmsley/ Knowles - whilst having a core right in the sweet spot of being too old for NRL yet still up to that standard (Makinson, Lomax). How I don’t know, and obviously there have been a few losses along the way in Thompson and now Grace, but we have always had the ability to either supplement (Paasi) or regrow (Lees) to maintain that standard.
So the challenge really is getting more academies up to the standards of Saints/ Wigan/ Leeds. It’s a very difficult question. I’m sure Warrington fans would be quick to point out that Warrington clubs have been relentlessly targeted by Saints and Wigan in recent years leaving them picking over the bones, and if the academy doesn’t get the quality in, it’s much harder to get quality out. Again part of that is that Saints and Wigan have demonstrable pathways into the professional game, who wouldn’t look at Roby/ Lomax/ Percival/ Knowles/ Lees/ Welsby/ Bennison and see consistent repeated progression not only into the first team, but then into leadership and senior roles (you can even extend that into Wellens in the coaching positions). Who do Warrington role out to show that?
One argument would be to regionalise the academies, so that this cross border poaching isn’t an issue. But the issue with that is that it effectively harms our ability to produce elite players. There are lots of examples of players being passed up by their “local” team to go on to make it elsewhere (Makinson being a fine example) and I don’t think we have enough elite players being produced to be able to afford that impact. I would absolutely advocate seeing clubs spend significantly more on their junior teams (maybe linking the number of marquees a team has to the investment in youth teams?) but it’s not a problem I’m sure money alone can solve
Statistics: Posted by Magic Superbeetle — Sun Sep 25, 2022 11:58 am