Wigan Warriors • Academy

I’ve not seen a Wigan junior team as flaky in defence as that before. They didn’t look like they wanted to try and mix it with the Saints forwards at all. After years of dominance at that level, we currently look to be hitting a bit of a lull. I’m not close enough to it to know why that is. Are we getting outbid for the best juniors? One thing is for sure, if you want to base the club around producing your own players, you can’t afford to not be getting the cream of the crop from the local area.

In saying all that, results aren’t hugely important at that level, if you can bring through a couple of top quality young players every so often, rather than rafts of decent ones, you’re probably better off. Saints haven’t won anything like the amount of titles we have at academy level but in the past 6-8 years, they’ve produced more internationals than we have.