The only reason we wouldn't have blooded them would be because we wouldn't have needed to blood them - we would have had capable players in the top 25 who we could play instead.
But after 2010 we didn't have enough of them, and so had to sign them from outside the club on overs. We lost most of our three quarter line and after his feats of late 2009 Hayne could no longer carry the rest of our spine. Then we had to replace Hindmarsh, Poore and Shackleton, and probably should have let go of Smith and/or Moimoi (though I understand we had no other merkin qualify for the long service discount).
Or, if the young guys were good enough to play firsts this year, we could simply have upped them to $80k, and had them as part of the top 25.
You're right, it's good to have options.
Throwing 3/4s of a million away is never a good use of the salary cap. Fortunately a lot of the young guys who Anderson found back in '09/'10 are starting to come good this year, and have saved some embarrassment. Sadly we got rid of a bunch of them in 2011/12 who went on to play rep footy, but thankfully not all of them.
So the worst we did was to let a winger go to play reserve grade for someone else? Good on Tupou for eventually edging into the Blues side three years later. That's what happens when you play in a strong club side outside a genuine rep centre.
But wingers are easy to come by (allowing us to let Sio go, for example) and we already have a big money winger in Semi Radradra, who is a better player than Tupou and younger. But it was good that we were able to keep Tupou through to the end of his NYC eligibility, where we could make the decision on whether to retain him. But we obviously had enough reserve grade wingers. In fact in 2011 we had far more reserve graders than we needed. There just wasn't room for Tupou.
Meanwhile nobody bothered to retain Mitchell Moses within our junior system in 2010, but apparently nobody in the NRL staff was communicating with the volunteers running the junior rep teams.
I can't really give Anderson credit though, it should go to Smithy for setting up the junior pathways system all those years before.
Having understudied Smith you'd think Anderson would have understood the importance of junior retention, but it's a fact that no NRL club has made the finals within three years of Daniel Anderson's ousting. He hasn't exactly left them in better shape than he found them.
I know we had a couple of blokes come along and stuff it all up, trying to rename things, but good to see it's all back on track and working well these days!
Hagan and Anderson did stuff it up but they didn't rename anything. I don't know what you mean by that.
#'academy'
