Quote Winslade's Offload="Winslade's Offload"From what I understand;
Wigan and Leeds have different youth structures to us. The Wigan area produces a large number of youngsters, and you will find them scattered around the whole of RL. Have a look at how many wigan players were in the last England Academy side. So Wigan can afford to pick the best from this crop and they will appear in their 1st team. Leeds have a policy that says you can tell if a player is going to make SL by the time he reaches 19. So by definition, their 19 year olds are already showing a level of performance that allows them to be moved into the 1st team. At Wire, TS believes that some players will move straight into the 1st team (Currie), but others develop later, and you need to hang on to these players and give them more time and experience.
So we end up with a number of 20 somethings that require game time at a higher level than U19 / U20. If you look at the list I produced, you will see that from the 12 players, only Saltonstall (19) and Ormsby have not played at Championship or SL level. They are nearly all loaned out to get the required experience. We have used Cas, London, Saints, Salford, Bradford and of course Swinton to achieve that.
As to who has the correct youth policy; Leeds or Wire, I really don't know. But we do need to remember that both Leeds and Wigan have access to far more local talent than we do, so there is a good argument for making sure we fully exploit every promising youngster on our books, before we release them.'"
Warrington have a similar view to Leeds as they have a small group of academy players known as the 'Wolfpack' who they identify as having the best chance of playing SL. They receive extra training, nutrition etc.
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