Warrington Wolves • Re: Powel has been sacked

The idea of a bad dressing room culture has been around in Wire for a while now.

In the DVDV era, we had a "spice boys" culture, players out in Mr Smiths, stories of shenanigans in pre season tours to Lanzarote. The senior players, especially the overseas signings, seemed to be driving this, which makes it very difficult for a coach to control.

Cullen had to deal with some of that as well. I remember during lockdown he did that podcast with Wood and Higham where he talked about his time as coach and having to compromise with the dressing room culture because a couple of the key players who he needed onside were the ones at the heart of it.

In the early years of TS that seemed to have cleaned up. Probably because the players we had were much more professional. We had senior players like Morley, Hodgson, Monaghan setting the tone.

Towards the end of TS's time though you could sense the dressing room was becoming harder to police. Early in his last season there were lots of stories on here about some of the young players directly confronting TS and whilst we don't know if those stories were true, it definitely seemed like those players had their "supporters" on here updating us with lots of gossip from inside the dressing room to stir up support for their cause.

The team seemed to be more together for a while under Price but I wonder if that was because Price indulged them a bit. The clip of Cooper jostling him was an eye opener, even if we want to brush it under the carpet as "its just his competitive edge"...I can't imagine any Leeds player doing that to Brian McDermott or Wigan player doing that to Wane.

Then Powell came in and last year clearly clashed with a lot of players who didn't approve of his methods - which is fair enough when you're here to change a culture. But the fact that we brought in a new crop of players who now have their own grievances is very disappointing.

It's a long term problem that the club needs to get on top of. I think they need to be much better at making decisions on new recruits based on character and professionalism.