Interesting comments - everyone on here wants to see the youth come through but they have to be of the appropriate ability and mindset. The success of the golden generation was a blend of superb home grown players - Sinfield, Burrow, McGuire very good SL recruits like Senior, Ellis and top quality overseas such as Webb/Buderus/Ali

I don't see any of this happening under Smith at the moment. It seems to me his recruiting is players he has coached previously e.g. Hooley/Lisone/McDonald.

To his defense he has moved on some poor players and he is hamstrung to a degree with the mishandling of the cap - no doubt numerous players will be moving on this autumn.

Hopefully Smith can be encouraged to move away from experimenting with his coaching style to developing a squad that can challenge the top sides on a regular basis. The better your players the better your team - this is not rocket science.

Smith is currently hamstrung by what he inherited.

Either way, the days of players of the calibre of Webb/Buderus and Ali coming to play in SL are long gone

I would agree with both comments - as I said this is blend.

To simplify:
Do we have youngsters of sufficient quality that we can build a future strategy based around them?
Are we signing the very best British players available
Are we signing the best available players from the NRL ie those best suited to SL

On all three of those I would say there is no indication/tangible evidence that to be the case when you look at recruitment/junior development elsewhere.

This is an elite club that supporters care passionately about - not some coaching education/preparation/experiment for a future job. For me Smith needs to get his head down and deliver performances that reflect the talent/quality available - something sadly lacking this year.

I agree, however I think your expecting too much from Smith in in his first full year, it simply isn’t fixable in that timeframe.

He’s come in, cleared as much deadwood as he can whilst getting us to a GF, next year is his real test IMO

I agree - hopefully he can keep doing his learning this year with a view to implementation next season.

Unfortunately you are correct, we were lucky with that crop of players. I for one really appreciated and enjoyed that era, mainly because prior to those players arriving I followed Leeds home and away for many seasons. By and large not a very enjoyable experience.

Since the Golden Generation , we are constantly told we have fantastic junior talent signed up , but not many of them seem to improve , something wrong with the coaching ?

I think we’ve got a good solid core of young English talent, in the pack in particular.

I’d say signing Bentley for example is a sign of trying to sign the best from other clubs a la Gaz Ellis. This is harder these days with many going straight to the nrl.

I think the are we haven’t hit out of those three mentioned is the top quality overseas recruitment, even if its relative (because there’s no chance of a Webb or Ali anymore) I think perhaps Smith has tried to address this with Nene and maybe Lisone, but there’s too much overseas in the dead wood category at the minute.

I don’t know the figures on how many make it from each age group generally but I would be surprised if it’s more than two or three. Plenty of our juniors have progressed to first team either here or elsewhere.

The bottom line is if it wasn’t for Leeds, Wigan and Sts the player pool would be in bother, maybe a bit of credit to widnes and Wakefield who have a smattering across the league.

Huddersfield have a great academy also