Back to his statement anyway, can't really see how anyone can disagree with it when the examples of RTS, Hoffman, Foran, Luke etc are put in front of you now comaored to their peaks, and they are only the last year or 2, goes back a lot further than that
I bag the Warriors as much as anyone, it almost pains me to defend them, but this is some bullshit.
Hoffman hasn't gone backwards because of Warriors, he's gone backwards because of age and the fact we only get decent Australian players when they're at the back end of their career.
Foran was troubled with constant injury issues. Its been a good couple of years since he was at his best.
RTS is still RTS. Makes between 150-200m a game, works his ass off. He couldn't defend when he was at the Roosters and yet somehow its the Warriors fault, he gets less opportunity with ball in hand because the Warriors attack in a very predictable way.
Luke has always been erratic. He got dropped at Souths on more than one occasion. The difference being at Souths he had Burgii, Teo etc providibg a platform so the good outweighed the bad. Not like here where the forwards plod to the 40m line.
And who are the players that show it reaches far back?
The only big name signings that come to mind are Tomkins, Price, Wiki, Mateo, Inu, Tate, Neilsen. None of them got worse outside of age slowing them down. Mateo actually had his most consistent couple of years under Cleary. Inu was Inu regardless of where he went. Tomkins was always a gamble and unknown quantity in NRL. Neilsen was just one of those players who turned to shit away from the Storm feeding him ball - not a Warriors only condition.
Outside of that nearly all our Aussie recruitment have been cheaper/fringe guys and I don't see how Maloney, Luck, Webb, Henderson, Gatis, Witt, Rovelli, McKinnon went backwards at all outside of injury.
Individuals look worse when the team is going poorly. The failure we have here is not players suddenly going backwards when they arrive but a failure of coaching/management to realise that you can't just bring in 1-2 high quality players and expect everything else to fix itself, especially when you're asking the spine to cover for a clearly inadequate bottom four forward pack.
Players don't magically devolve here, they just aren't in a team that allows them to highlight their strengths.
What Johns said was typical ignorant BS, which is pretty par for the course when it comes to Aussie media talking about the Warriora. Heaven forbid any of them dig deep enough to look at the root of the problem rather than peddling surface issues off as expertise to satisfy the need to hear their own voice.
