Warrington Wolves • Re: Where do we go from here?

This gets said a lot but I don't see any real evidence that it's related to whether a player came from the academy.

During my time as a Wire fan we've generally been behind Wigan, Leeds, Saints in terms of the share of regular first teamers that came through our own academy, but there were two periods where we did have a lot of Academy products in the team.

One was in the earlier Cullen era where we had Hilton, Paul Wood, Stevens, Noone, Wainwright, Sibbitt, Mark Gleeson, Hulse and then he introduced Pickersgill and Riley.

The second was in the later TS era where we had Cooper, Currie, Evans, O'Brien, Ormsby, Penny, Patton, Livett, King, Philbin, Dwyer.

Some of these players were good, some were ordinary, some would obviously run into the ground for the shirt, others were just run of the mill in terms of attitude. But I don't remember thinking in these eras that these guys were noticeably better than the players around them or noticeably more committed.

I think there is an important point around doing due diligence when you sign a big star, either from the NRL or SL. I remember reading something about Sir Alex Ferguson's approach to recruitment, that he never followed a 'galactico' approach and the one obvious time he did (Juan Sebastian Veron) didn't work out. He liked to sign players on the way up who had the hunger to win things, rather than players who had already won a lot and were mentally in a position where they could have coasted.

Sometimes Wire have been in a position where we have signed players who had won SL or NRL Grand Finals, and we thought it was great we are getting someone with 'winning experience' but they probably looked at Warrington and thought we're probably not going to win a GF, it's more about securing a good contract (maybe the last big contract they will get in their careers). With some recent NRL signings I've wondered whether we were really just signing players who were out of contract, couldn't get what they wanted from an NRL club and their agent wanted to park them in SL for a year or two on a good deal, hoping a club with a vacancy in their position would have more cap space a couple of years down the line.

Some big stars have great attitudes and bring that wherever they go. Jamie Peacock won everything at Bradford, went to Leeds and wanted to achieve more. We had that with Adrian Morley, Brett Hodgson. In the NRL you get a certain type of Aussie competitor personality, who even if they aren't a big name, will identify with the team they are in and buy in: Greg Mackey, Nat Wood, Chris Hicks. These are well worth finding.

I think we need to do a lot more due diligence into the attitudes of players that we target and not just get hoodwinked into agents' marketing, but I don't think this is an issue about whether players come from the Academy or not. If we had an Academy that produced better talent (better than those players listed above) then in a salary-cap constrained league its an advantage because we'd always have a pool of low-cost young players to bring into the squad, and even when they get future contracts, its easier to keep a unit together like Leeds did, where most of those individuals were paid less than they could have done had they gone to other clubs (inevitably the odd one will leave like Calderwood did). Although if you do produce world class stars like Harris and Scully you can't expect to keep them on the cheap in a team that's not competing at the top, just because they came through the Academy.