Judder Man wrote:
Yes but you are going back 50 years when most clubs had home grown talent, my earlier post mentioned the Superleague Era. I'm pretty sure Widnes didn't have a lot of home grown talent in that period the UK players were mainly from Wigan and Saints in that Widnes side.
As I said earlier its only Leeds, Wigan and Saints who are doing the business of getting players from their academies to progress into the first team, all other clubs are not doing enough to increase the depth of the UK player pool.
Most clubs didn't have that much home grown talent back then, in1975 Warrington used 40 players and only 8 were from Warrington. Ten came from St.Helens. Salford had one Salford born player - Sammy Turnbull, Lancashire clubs had a good number of Wigan lads in their teams. At that time Swinton had 10 saints/wigan players and only 4 swinton lads.
In Lancashire the Saints/Wigan clubs successes fostered great interest in the playing of the game in those towns and their amateur set ups have fed that success for decades, that in turn attracts more talented youngsters into the game from those towns for them to continue winning the cups.
Obviously an ambitious Warrington have tried hard for years to replicate those production lines but haven't got anywhere near the historic and effective Saints/Wigan set ups.
Frank Mylers 1970's Widnes had 25 Widnes born players delivering success and that went on for some time, into another generation of great local born Widnes players, who kept that success going and the cups coming in in the 1980's when Jonathan Davies played for them. There's little RL talent there now.........
All SL clubs have player development "foundations" paid for by SKY so they all but Salford run academies, the problem is all the best young talent want to go to the Wigan's, Saints and Leeds of this world. How do you "do enough" if your best local kids Like Watkins as a young salford academy lad, are intent at signing at the top clubs???
