Squad Changes for 07

[Frederick]

There has been a nasty trend in the last few seasons to sign aging forwards (Davico, Smith, etc.).

Seeings as you put etc in there, would you care to name all the other ageing forwards that we've signed in the last few seasons??

...What's that? You can't? Yeah, that's what I thought :roll:

I'd hardly call it a trend either...Smith was signed on an initial short term contract at the height of the worst injury crisis the club has ever faced. He had an absolute cracker of a season, and was rewarded with a second year.

Davico was signed for 2 years to add further experience to our young pack, provided he could stay injury free, which he has done, and has provided extra grunt and go-forward off the bench.

The experience those two would have brought to our club is invaluable. I'm sure that had we not signed them, Perry would still be suspended for 18 games out of the season, and Wooly would be back to his old no-impact self. Nasty trend? f**k off christopherjon :arrow:

 

[CJKnight]

The ages when they were signed by our club were approximately:

Davico: 31
Smith: 33
Reyno: 27
Sargent: 28

The average expiry date of a rugby league player is 32 I read in RLW. That means players like these were signed with only an average of 2-3 years in mind.

I was simply commenting that it is refreshing to see some younger blokes (specifically forwards) who are being signed with anywhere from 5-10 years still on the kilometer.

If a bloke like Tupou succeeds where a bloke like Royal failed then we could have a top forward in our pack for 10+ years. I will reiterate: IF he succeeds.

I have no problem with signing experienced players. But IMO we seemed to have been signing an awful lot of them and very few younger blokes like Tupou in the past couple of seasons. Royal was the last non-flegg player I can remember.