I truly believe for the club to be a strong performer long term they need to focus on their juniors and get those systems in place to be churning out consistent competent NRL players, not super stars, but consistent NRL first graders. There should be a sprinkling of superstars in their anyhow.
These players tend to stay for cheaper making salary cap management much easier.
But you can't just have an NRL team full of juniors, so the team needs to be scouring regions for young talent and bringing them to the club early and working them through with our juniors. And this clearly includes islanders and england etc.
Finally, we need to fill a roster and will need to buy in talent already established in first grade. Can't ensure we will have good quality spine players but those are clearly key so need to fill those spots with quality and that is where the savings on those juniors comes to play.
The club needs to go on a promotion blitz and maintain it all around the hunter trying to ensure all junior players have that asperation to play for the Knights.
Brock Lamb, Dylan Pythian, Jack Cogger, Nick Meaney are names that come to mind that are talents we have squandered simply by hitting grade in to a ****house NRL team that chewed them up and spat them back out.
Brock Lamb especially I think was the better talent out of that lot, but was a dead man walking straight from the outset as the team was vrey poor, gave him no chance to find his feet in the NRL, got hammered with criticism and sent packing.
Mark Hughes is a great example, I love Mark Hughes but being brutal he was a fairly average player, but survived in the top grade largely because of the team of players he was with. A player like him wouldn't last in our squad today.
