Knights land Peter O'Sullivan

Way too early to make a call. I’ve liked a lot of his targets in terms of young forwards. Young with talent rather than blokes that haven’t worked out at other clubs which has been a go to for us in the past. Problem is we have nothing going for us as a club to make them want to come to us over the good clubs also fighting for their signings. I like that he’s targeting players other clubs actually want though which is a refreshing change. Naturally he’s not going to get every single signing right, especially the young ones that haven’t played first grade yet. That happens at every single club. I’m just hoping one of the ones he gets wrong won’t be Brown as that’s the one so far that will have a negative impact on the cap.
 
Owey said:
I really like the Dolphins squad he built. Early days, I still think he is the best in the business. Maybe the biggest thing we can take out of what he has done so far is not paying overs for some of his targets. That sits well with me.
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I think Will Sulivan will be a good signing. Teague is a gap filler.

The biggest issue he inherited a cap that was miss spent and ultimately the decision to get rid of D saf has really cost us more than we probably realised.

I still think his got something up his sleeve for next year. I think Manuluda
 
Not sure if all these are POS signings, but all interesting.

1 Toby Winter - classy and fast fullback - Ball and Flegg
2 Aiden Gow - an athlete who has set try scoring records in Ball and is now training with Flegg - has a lot to learn still - but could be a Bradman Best
3 Taj Annan - slowly learning his role in reserve grade - big and fast centre or wing
4 Sully Hoad - exciting, multiskilled footballer who can play anywhere in the backs. Makes a few mistakes, but does lots of good things too
5 Mason Forbes - skinny winger who moves like Davie Armstrong - plays fullback too
6 Cullen Gray - union player who is a great goal kicker and very fast, but struggling a bit in Flegg I think
7 Ryder Williams - was a top 30 player for the Titans - big for a half - good kicking game - not as hard working as you'd like
8 Wil Sullivan - improving slowly, but hasn't set the world on fire yet
9 Aydon Hoad - a lot of skill and great running game, but his fitness is not good enough yet.
10 Tyrone Thompson - getting there slowly
11 Francis Manuleleua - another couple of good line breaks this week and 179 run metres. He also pulls out some huge tackles. Lots of rough edges still.
12 Sione Haukinima - giant 16 year old who is surprisingly agile for a 120kg kid. They'll need to get at least 10kg off him and improve his minutes to more than 20 in Mathews.
13 Mason Teague - has played 8 games of firstgrade. Made 40 tackles with 1 missed yesterday in a 65 minute stint.

Honestly, it's like that old american movie where they put together a team of misfits who all had "issues", but also had talents as well.
Every one of them has a big list of thinkgs to work on, but also does a lot of things that are impressive.

We really need a great development coach to work with all those guys - I'm hoping Michael Dobson is that guy.
 
Of those 3, Annan, Sullivan, and Manuleleua are signed beyond this season, 2026, 2028, 2026 with Thompson and Teague this year so time to develop. The others are still very young.
Only time will decide the success of signings but it is all looking long term, hard to see any real success this or next season
 
Billy said:
Not sure if all these are POS signings, but all interesting.

1 Toby Winter - classy and fast fullback - Ball and Flegg
2 Aiden Gow - an athlete who has set try scoring records in Ball and is now training with Flegg - has a lot to learn still - but could be a Bradman Best
3 Taj Annan - slowly learning his role in reserve grade - big and fast centre or wing
4 Sully Hoad - exciting, multiskilled footballer who can play anywhere in the backs. Makes a few mistakes, but does lots of good things too
5 Mason Forbes - skinny winger who moves like Davie Armstrong - plays fullback too
6 Cullen Gray - union player who is a great goal kicker and very fast, but struggling a bit in Flegg I think
7 Ryder Williams - was a top 30 player for the Titans - big for a half - good kicking game - not as hard working as you'd like
8 Wil Sullivan - improving slowly, but hasn't set the world on fire yet
9 Aydon Hoad - a lot of skill and great running game, but his fitness is not good enough yet.
10 Tyrone Thompson - getting there slowly
11 Francis Manuleleua - another couple of good line breaks this week and 179 run metres. He also pulls out some huge tackles. Lots of rough edges still.
12 Sione Haukinima - giant 16 year old who is surprisingly agile for a 120kg kid. They'll need to get at least 10kg off him and improve his minutes to more than 20 in Mathews.
13 Mason Teague - has played 8 games of firstgrade. Made 40 tackles with 1 missed yesterday in a 65 minute stint.

Honestly, it's like that old american movie where they put together a team of misfits who all had "issues", but also had talents as well.
Every one of them has a big list of thinkgs to work on, but also does a lot of things that are impressive.

We really need a great development coach to work with all those guys - I'm hoping Michael Dobson is that guy.
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🙏🏼
 
Celticman98 said:
Manuleulua could be a very good signing but unsure if he ends up as a edge or middle.
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He's the guy I look at in reserves who has the power, leg speed I've been talking about. I've been a fan of KPP, mainly for his defence, since he got here. But compare him running at half pace towards the line last night to Kautoga who played opposite him and the difference was stark.
 
The knights problem is they have 10 guys in their top 30 or on development that are never going to play first grade and have done for 3 years, the place is a joke run by player managers. Not to mention the clown they had running recruitment before POS.
 
I think a lot about those episodes of Bay 53 with Ben Darwin, where he talks about well built and poorly built teams, and the thing he puts Penrith’s success down to, more than anything else, is that they’re a well built team on a level which we haven’t actually seen in the NRL before. That includes Roosters/Storm teams of the past. In the 2024 grand final 13 of their 17 players had been in their pathways since their early teens - this is after four years of them being raided every offseason. If you put together a scale on this front, with the best and worst built teams in NRL history, each Penrith premiership winning team would be multiple standard deviations above the next best.

Well built = High levels of long term cohesion, system familiarity, institutional knowledge, etc. During the 2020 grand final, there were 15-18 year olds who would feature in the 2024 grand final learning the “Penrith way” and being drilled in a style of footy which is consistent from grade to grade to grade. And they didn’t decide on this style of footy on a whim: it goes right back to those early to mid 2010’s junior rep teams, where they looked at the best talent they had, thought about their strengths and weaknesses, and built the play style around that. Then they targeted kids who they thought had a lot in common with their first graders. Sunia Turuva is a similar player to Brian To’o. Luron Patea is a lot like Moses Leota. Isaiya Katoa is a fair bit like Nathan Cleary with some sliders adjusted. Etc etc etc. Not all the kids pan out but they have a template and they stick to it pretty hard. Even when they’ve brought new players in like Alamoti or Talagi, they’ve been reluctant to select them - and have picked worse players over them - until they felt those players were comfortable with the system.

No one else in the history of this sport has really had a vision like this and stuck to it. It’s a copycat league and teams are copying the Penrith play style, but not really the essence.

I wonder why it is that NRL teams in particular aren’t well built? Is it because we don’t have a draft? It’s really hard to sell fans on a long term build like this because you don’t get rewarded with the best young talent in those “building” seasons where the team, frankly, isn’t very good. Furthermore fans see other teams turn things around very quickly - and Darwin would put this down to there being an abundance of poorly built teams, so your team doesn’t have to be *that* good to outperform them - and then the dogs really start barking for everything to be torn up and start again.

I wonder if the fact that Penrith never actually sucked while their kids were coming through made a difference? They squared the circle of year on year competitiveness while gradually introducing young players.

Nevertheless, as Billy has always maintained - the only road to success for Newcastle is internal development.

What sort of players tend to come from our region? What do they tend to be naturally good at? Has anyone ever really asked that question? Or do we just every year copy what other teams are doing and hope it works for us?
 
Just a follow on from that one: I look around the league at the players who’ve spent significant time in our pathways and now play elsewhere. The first thing I notice: Lots of very good forwards. Some of the best forwards, in fact, in the entire sport. Blockbusting runners. Hard nosed, bruising workhorses.

If we’re searching for an identity, that’s not a bad place to start, I would have thought.

It’s genuinely weird that the pack is the biggest issue with our roster. Womp womp.
 
I actually don’t think it’s far off what the Knights did when they first entered the league. I’m pretty sure in the early years when Allan McMahon was coach, David Waite had juniors all learning the same systems, structures, and training the same way across the club.

Look at 2001 and you could say it was quite similar to Penrith for that generation of players that came through.

Unfortunately I think things went off the rails after that first season under Hagan, the production line seemed to totally die. Wrong decisions started being made on who to retain. Some super average players came into first grade. Can’t have helped that we were pretty much bankrupt for most of the 00s.
 
jamesgould said:
I actually don’t think it’s far off what the Knights did when they first entered the league. I’m pretty sure in the early years when Allan McMahon was coach, David Waite had juniors all learning the same systems, structures, and training the same way across the club.

Look at 2001 and you could say it was quite similar to Penrith for that generation of players that came through.

Unfortunately I think things went off the rails after that first season under Hagan, the production line seemed to totally die. Wrong decisions started being made on who to retain. Some super average players came into first grade. Can’t have helped that we were pretty much bankrupt for most of the 00s.
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Yeah and you’ve got to give the club some grace on that front. And yeah Darwin does mention that - things used to be a lot better. This was one aspect of the challenge facing Wests: You need to rebuild the club, not the roster.

His other take on Newcastle’s issue is basically that we have terminal Joey brain - as does the media when they talk about us. The idea at the club since Joey retired has been that we find THE player and we build around that. Ponga is Joey 2. To him, it’s unrealistic, and Joey wasn’t THE reason the Knights won premierships. We didn’t START with Joey and build it around that. The club naturally formed around him over time. It was organic and the natural result of his supreme talent & force of personality. If Joey was never born, that team would have just been different. Played different. Does that make sense?

It also wasn’t “Joey and his disciples” as early in his career as it was for Ponga, either. That transition doesn’t really start to happen until the late 90’s. Before that he really was just one fantastic player among many. Likely our best by 1997, but not to the point where people called us a “one man team” like they would later.

Similarly, Penrith’s play style gravitating heavily around a really dominant on-ball halfback + a ball playing lock who plays 80 minutes every game? They didn’t plan for that from the outset.
Peter Parr, a very successful administrator, might not be helping on this front, as he essentially built his career on being the guy who signed Johnathan Thurston…
 
jamesgould said:
I actually don’t think it’s far off what the Knights did when they first entered the league. I’m pretty sure in the early years when Allan McMahon was coach, David Waite had juniors all learning the same systems, structures, and training the same way across the club.

Look at 2001 and you could say it was quite similar to Penrith for that generation of players that came through.

Unfortunately I think things went off the rails after that first season under Hagan, the production line seemed to totally die. Wrong decisions started being made on who to retain. Some super average players came into first grade. Can’t have helped that we were pretty much bankrupt for most of the 00s.
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We lost a lot of promising juniors around that time because we just simply couldn’t afford to keep them. Other clubs came in and raided our best talent

In saying that, we should be doing a better job of identifying talent now and keeping them
 
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