Well he clearly shares a similar sentiment in this regard, and I’d say that comes from him being a product of the panthers.
Local pride was always a big thing for Penrith due to its distance from the rest of Sydney, when Penrith came into existence in 1967 it was basically a country town. I think a lot of the mentality surrounding juniors comes from that.
That has nothing to do with it. If it did, he would have tried that at the Roosters but he built a dynasty there with a different approach. Albeit, he did improve their junior programme.
At the Panthers he studied the Broncos and looked at their strategy for success. He saw that their aim was to have 80% juniors and he believed that since they are the most successful club in the NRL, it was a strategy worth emulating.
I believe 80% is an aspirational goal, but will be flexed as and when required. The main thing is it gets the club focused on its junior development pathways. It makes it clear we are a development club. This has to be our primary source of players. Why?
Well, since we have one of the largest junior bases, which is a source of competitive advantage, it would be strange not to use the resource. Secondly, we are not a glamour club. Our location is not attractive to 90% of players, we don't have a long and storied history and we can't offer lots of TPA's to sweeten the pot.
All of the strategies espoused on here assume that getting players is just a simple matter of us deciding to sign some more players and focus less on the juniors. And yet we went out for Thurston with one of the most famous, influential and persuasive men in rugby league doing the negotiations and we come up short. The same happened with Carney. You must ask the question why? Our money is as good as anybody else's, but we don't have the success, the glamour, the location or TPA's to get the best players to want to come here. I accept that we can get good players like Merrin and Tamou, but not superstars.
I loved the 2003 team but it was one Swallow and that doesn't make a summer. Subsequent to that we were barely competitive for ten years, picking up a wooden spoon and making the semi's twice. Prior to that and post our 91 premiership, we were uncompetitive for the best part of 11 years reaching the dizzy heights of fifth on two occasions. We were below average. When you consider the resources at our disposal it was criminal mismanagement of the club.
Now we have success at every grade, make the semis for 4 out of 5 years and the club is built mainly from juniors developed within. We think we should abandon that and do something different because we haven't won a premiership yet.......
Give me strength. How soon we forget the years of mediocrity and failure at this club. I would rather we keep doing what we are doing, instead of 2 premierships every 40 years, spaced between failure, irrelevance and wooden spoons.
Using our old strategy of waiting until all the moons align and we throw a double six, the next premiership should be about 2023.....
