Yet we still blame Des after 12 years when he was first given apparent permission to start dismantling the pathways system.
God the club has been so mismanaged over the years.
The juniors have always been strong and competitive. The difference is now we are buying more outside players turning top 4 finishes into premierships. Hasler just focused on the NRL side of things. The last Hasler signed player contract expired end of 2020 season. We had a war chest and blew it. The decline is far more complex than Hasler, Castle, Dib, Anderson's and Khoury. I won't go into it as people don't like long detailed analysis of things and I have to protect my mental health. I do have a lot of confidence in Druissi and Warburton.
We did blunder Hasler on 3 fronts. We had the chance after 2016 to say you've had 5 good years both the club and Hasler need a new direction. We had the chance in 2017 when his contract was expiring to organise an amicable end of season exit early on in the piece we blundered there. We re-signed Hasler for 2 years. The biggest blunder was sacking him before he even started his new contract. Once we signed him we had to back him.
I still say our problems aren't juniors, pathways or development. It's just an easy thing to use as 95% of eyes are on the NRL side and it's an easy thing to use pathways, rebuilds, we won junior games today to cover over the core of the business being winning NRL games. Our problems are we don't prepare players for the next jump up especially into the NRL. Our NRL coaching, NRL preparation and NRL development are the main core issues. We have also blundered our recruitment. Barrett, Anderson and Khoury had a war chest to work with and dropped it. Khoury was responsible for the Allan and Flanagan signings. When they signed Allan was current origin fullback for QLD (by default) and Flanagan scored over 190 points for the season.
We boasted before round 1 that our 2021 roster had been completely dismantled even though a small fact of players used in 2021 were re-signed in 2022 or 2023 and one player Patolo is still here & re-signed. We've had cap space since end of 2020 season. We blew up the 2021 side. We still don't know what our spine is going to look like as the season goes on.
