Vaughan is and was a worker and focused player that always gave you meters. Evans is an under achiever and so far a wasted talent who rarely hits the line as hard as he should. This myth that Vaughan was average or playing below starting quality output is way off the mark.
Sticky just has a fat for both Boyd and Junior and exercised his right to prioritize them over Vaughan. Our coaches failure was to under value both Junior and Vaughan, probably the best two front rowers in the NRL today, for different reasons, to our teams misfortune.
However my greatest concern is the lack of junior quality coming out of our club, especially in the spine positions and the frontrow. Besides Junior and Hayne, who else have we produced that is beyond a solid to somewhat good player?
I mean junior, not fly ins like Semi. The last great crop was during Haynes junior days and that's a big part of why we made a GF, only to have it stolen from us. My point is, a club like ours should be getting a good wack of its talent from our nursery and then supplementing it with imports. That way we don't have salary issues and players will always want to come and play here due to the all round strength we offer and the benefits it ultimately produces to all.
And as for losing Junior to the Raiders, some may say, hindsight is 20/20, but if you could not see that Junior was the future and king pin of our squad to build the rest of the forwards around and read the papers(being facetious) that the salary cap was always going to rise to accommodate the higher offers, well then you have what we have today. A very ordinary forward pack who try hard but get out muscled by the bigger more aggressive packs.
I keep saying it, but as much as I like Arthur, and I think that he is the man for the job at present, he keeps making rookie mistakes. I remember Cam Smith in a profile interview last year say that when the Storm had an ordinary year by their standards, he and the senior players sat down with the coach and identified their major weakness. It turned out to be SIZE. So they purposefully went out into the market place and bought up BIG. Now if you look at their 2016 GF forward squad, I think from memory that the smallest player 6' 1" but the rest were 6' 3", all the way up to 6' 7" I think of quality forward muscle. As always with the Storm though, the vultures circle and pick off the their low lying fruit, but what are they doing in response? Oh yeah...Kasiano.
We had one, but we let him get away, now we will suffer that decision for at least another year(2018) because there is no one left before that who would fit the bill. So I don't expect to make any real impression on the comp till 2019 at the earliest.
That is not great squad management if you ask me. Look at Manly, I don't really rate Barrett, but he has turned a very ordinary injury riddled and player retirement beset club, into a very good and competitive organization in the space of one year.
We seem to take an eternity to turn our ship around, just like the other Westie losers in the comp, like Tigers and Panthers. I am just so sick of waiting for our team to turn around and become what it should have always been. A power house and watching a good man/coach make boob errors and then reading ne'er do wells like Pou constantly defend those bad decision as some kind of master stroke. Pou you are kidding yourself and have a losers temperament and philosophy.
Unless we make a significant signing in the forwards, then what we currently see is what we will get. We will have our moments, if we ever get our team healthy and all playing together, but we will ultimately struggle against the larger more explosive forward packs. Time to cut some of these backup forwards and sign a animal monster on big bucks. If we don't get one this year and I don't really think we can, I would go all out to get Junior back to play with his mates and childhood club in 2019.
