Warrington Wolves • Re: Cooper to Wigan confirmed
Barbed Wire wrote:
Smith inherited a basket case without any glimmer of success since the early 90’s. He was out third coach in 7 or 8 months and didn’t have the benefit of a pre-season in that period.
He walked in the door, to the demotion of the man who was to act as his assistant and got better results. We have had Powell as the coach elect since March(approx) of last year, months of planning and preparing for the squad he would have and could add to and take away. He had a full pre-season without a major international drain. Hit the ground running with 3 out of 3 and then the wheels have fell off.
He has had 2 opportunities (I think) to have ‘mini pre-seasons’ when we don’t have fixtures, to hard-reset the team, which is actually quite important rather than just recovery into prep mid-week. Smith didn’t get that as he took us to Wembley. And yet now, we have regressed, week on week. I’m biased, because I thoroughly enjoyed Smith’s 2009-2016 era and I have a respect and loyalty to him, but it is incomparable between the impact of the two coaches.
I am also a hardcore Smith loyalist but he did inherit a different situation. He had a squad which was full of very talented players and had just had a bad coaching situation as Cullen's last year was a year too long especially given the other stuff he had to deal with at the time, and Jimmy Lowes was not an SL standard head coach. Powell has inherited a team that had gone stagnant and needed an overhaul.
If TS came back to coach us now, I doubt he would have the same impact he did in 2009.
However, its interesting to consider where we would be if we had just kept on with TS right through and not had Price or Powell. I think it was time for both parties to move on at the end of 2017, but I wouldn't be surprised if we had ended up with a better win-loss record since then if TS had stayed, than what we have had under Price and Powell.
Statistics: Posted by sally cinnamon — Wed Jun 15, 2022 9:41 pm