You mean the man who dragged a rubbish bradford side into 4th place? Looked very good in a poor bradford side. They paid way over the odds for him though as is being proven now when they have put all of their eggs in one basket and don't think they have won since he got injured. Still, when you're a small club like bradford you have to pay over the odds for players

As opposed to being a big club and paying under the odds for over the hill players!!!

As opposed to a club who pay players to sit at the other side of the world for months on end you mean !!

I see your point regarding being near the cap but because we haven't had the time or money put into developing our own players means we sometimes have to pay slightly more for average players unlike the likes ofHull, Bradford, Saints, Wigan etc. Only now can we see that we have some players coming through capable of 1st team and you would probably have to look past our current 20's team to the under 18's for the next batch who should come through(if good enough) within the next twenty four months.

Not knowing what we are paying Newton, Galea, Clinton, Vella, Dobson I can't comment if they are over paid or not however they fit our needs.By the time they leave Rovers we are likely to have had a minimum service of 3 years from each player, if say we had paid the same money to Orford, Fitzgibbon, Menzies etc we would have been changing every couple of years which in our case, with the lack of home grown players wasn't feasable.Signing Newton, Galea etc allows us the time to develop our own players.

Not saying that Fitzgibbon isn't a good signing, he quite clearly is a good signing and has had a positive affect and is what was what Hull needed.

You have to be a Hull fan to be privvy to that kind of information

Like I say, to those who don't know the game too well, its obviously quite all right to pay big money to crocks here for the pension as long as they have an impressive CV.

We might not have signed stars as big as Berrigan and Matt King, but where did their clubs finish last year compared to Rovers? Any idiot can see players should be valued on performance rather than rep honours from the past.

Very sensible post. From larry's post earlier though it looks like it's still the case

But the point you're missing is that it's OK to retrospectively say a player has done well, or another on has been injured too much, but that isn't the point I'm making, it's that rovers are obviously paying more than other SL clubs for the same standard players

This may well be true, but the reasons why are obvious. As those contracts come to an end we will see Rovers depth of quality improve compounded by the promotion of real quality talent coming through the youth system. This Rovers side will get stronger and stronger over the next three years.

It is however absurd to ignore how players have performed since being signed. Was it three or four Rovers players in the Dream team last season?

Indeed - we don't get the 'success/reputation discount' that Saints or Leeds, for example, have. When we recruited heavily for the 2008 season, we were trying to attract players to a team that finished 2nd bottom (for all that that represented 'success' in 2007) and had had a long spell out of the top flight before that. As has been acknowledged, we gave out bigger and longer contracts, than we'd have ideally liked to make the squad more competitive. Those signings were considered quite a coup at the time, and they have mostly worked out well.
Partly because it would have been difficult to attract the very biggest names, and partly, I suspect, because Morgan wanted to spread his eggs between a few baskets, we went for very good, rather than great players.
Hull have gone for a different balance, spending big on legendary veterans like Fitzgibbon and Long. On the other hand that is balanced by you having Cusack and Moa taking up quota spots, where we have to use them all for frontline players as we haven't yet built up a depth of club-trained players. O'Meley has been a top signing and is a big name, but his stock down under had dropped pretty dramatically from the reports I saw (as had Clinton's, I know). At 29 he is still not old for a prop and obviously came across hungry and with a point to prove - Those are the best type of signing IMO.