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To be fair to Brandy, I can see that period of his career having a heap of baggage - he just wanted to get the hell out of Sydney because everything was just too painful to stay... and it's understandable that influences his feelings about everything from that time, even if on a subconscious level.
Maybe if the Warriors want to adopt a winning style from another club, they need to look at the Raiders template instead of Penrith?
Yeh good point
Maybe but it killed their crowds and it destroyed the game such that super rugby was a serious rival
The game likes to use Super League as the reason why things weren't going well in Sydney, but truth is crowds were down long before Murdoch came along.
No super league then Cronulla and wests would’ve died
Nah, despite the current coach pushing for that because of his pet player they wont do that. There's no player overseas that would have made a lick of difference to the outcome of the game. The coach, and fans from his franchise, think that pet player would make the difference but he wouldn't have, there are coaching issues which are the problem.
TBH, I think there's a school of thought that could argue that Super League was a net positive for the game as it raised player salaries to the point where the comp was actually a fully professional sports league. I remember back in those days Gary Freeman discussing how they didn't get huge sums for playing and how all players had to have a job and were often reliant on win bonuses to supplement their income.
Game was paying around 100k for some players and it soon went to a million which was way beyond what they could afford
Yes absolutely that's what Webster has done.
I like how they can grind it’s their best feature. They won a lot of games this year the warriors would normally lose
Yeah, the grind was good. Although the simple fact is that without Leka we only just make the 8 (or worse don't make it). His individual brilliance saved as twice at crucial times stopping what could have turned into a run of losses.
Yeah get it was a tough time with his brothers passing, also think it was a bit of a hit to his ego making way for the emergence of SJ. In saying that you’d think he’d be proud of being a key guy in the start of NZs first professional sporting franchise but you rarely see him acknowledge it- I can’t remember ever seeing him interact with the old boys etc?
He was ok, problem in the early days plenty of the Big name non NZ players came for the paycheck/retirement fund and didn’t really put in and we actually got more value out of the lesser known locals - Brandy was “ok” but (understandably) not the player he was and there was talk he wasn’t impressed when Stacy took his spot. Phil Blake was probably the pick of the Aussie imports.
I was initially disappointed in the Warriors siding with Superleague as I saw it as being a little disrespectful jumping so early- however the ridiculous financial albatross that the likes of Warriors and Western Reds had to deal with (paying for flights and accommodation for both their away games as well as covering visiting teams) it’s no surprise they jumped at the chance to free themselves from that. Another big factor was the NZRL and every other international team siding with Superleague the Warriors needed to go along to keep the kiwis competitive
The Struggles the GC Giants/Seagulls/Gladiators/Crushers had with an identity it wouldn’t surprised me if they had merged with the Crushers at some point. Would have been interesting to see what Perth would have become and if Adelaide would have carved out a foothold.
Looking at our recruitment targets of late think the club are well aware of what we need. Forwards I think we are in a pretty good spot with a mix of experience and some fantastic youth coming through, however the loss of Barney was massive and probably equal to that of Metcalf- looking at targets we are looking at another prop, we’ve signed that kid from Souths and were offered NAS (but not at his price).
