Fully wrote:
Nothing wrong with having them. It's the fact you've got so many of them and don't seem like ever wanting to reduce them.
But surely the emergance of Scott Taylor, Jordan Cox, Kris Welham, Sam Latus, Louis Sheriff, Liam Watts, Josh Hodgson...etc makes up for us having those numbers? The development of Welham has a lot to do with work Jake Webster has done for him, Cox and Taylor always praise Mick Vella, Ben Galea and Clint Newton. These players may not have come through had it not been for the overseas stars that are signed.
My honest opinion is that had Sandercock been appointed before we started making signings we would not have had Lincoln Withers and Ryan O'Hara nor probably G.Horne, David Hodgson and it seems certainly not Misi Taulapapa. Who knows who would have come in but with Withers and O'Hara being exempt we would have had 2 less.
I actually think the way to tackle this is to have a maximum number of overseas players that can play in a game rather than how many are in the squad. As long as there are 8 home grown, 5 fed-trained and a maximum of 4 overseas players in your 17 each week means you would have to still produce your own but you could rotate the stars meaning the quality of those stars stays at the same level all season. The salary cap would dictate how many overseas stars you could have in your squad as would the maximum number of players in your first team, 20's and 18's (which is currently 65 all together).
As long as there is a notable effort in producing English talent as most clubs are at the moment I do not see why there is such a big emphasis put on how many we have over in this country. What we do need to do though is allow greater wages for home grown stars. No matter what people think of the Tomkins brothers, Kyle Eastmond...etc they are world class players who will or would improve our international game. If the clubs were able to offer these players the money Union clubs obviously are or the RFL were to help with these payments to keep these stars in the sport and or country maybe overseas stars would start to dwindle due to clubs being more keen to fill their squads with a higher quality home grown stars.
