The disappointing thing with our recruitment is des targets a player (abbey, RFM, Lee) and stops at nothing until he gets them.... But he will never target someone that is actually decent (rep quality).
Yet there are rising stars out there and we never have a look at them. I was looking at parras recruitment for next year, they are still picking up quality players. And they even have that young French kid coming through who can be anything.
Titans picked up Taylor and rebuild their complete spine during the season with rep players more or less.
Fair enough with Cleary, he was following his dad. But almost everywhere you look you see 18 year olds coming through doing well, besides at the dogs. We chase players who are 23-25 and have never played NRL. Des thinks he can analyse their game and moneyball them into superstars. But instead has a team that completes at 50% because he hasn't put the money in key positions.
I have never seen our junior/reserve grade team struggle as much as it has now. We always had top players in u20 (Barba, idris, afu, kite, kasiano, klemmer, Reynolds, Harrison etc) fair enough they aren't all NRL superstars but in their age group they were some of the best running around. And we were usually a top 8 team, now with our recruitment we haven't played in the finals for a few years Atleast and haven't seen the flow on affect of successful juniors filtering through to successful first graders. Shame really because we aren't the team we used to be.
