Quote ="Shabino"The trouble is you can take none of this for granted. Saints were lucky to a degree to get Ben Barba. He was the spark for all of this. They’ve made some good calls, had good luck on injury front, but there are sooo many factors involved wit creating a winning team. Leeds has tried and our time will come again as some good young players pushing through again.'"
There are lots of factors in pretty much every facet of sport, but the teams who do the best are those who stack the odds in their favour. We were lucky at Leeds to have the golden generation come through together, but that's because the club made huge moves to sign the best youngsters and have the best system in place. Then we had more hits than misses with our recruitment. Barba was a gamble for Saints given the circumstances he arrived in, but so was Ali for us.
There are plenty of Sliding Doors moments in sport. But right now, Saints have stacked the odds in their favour. Great recruitment at home and from the NRL, brilliant academy a clear way of playing and a structure to for players to transition to the first team. We fell off with our academy and its coaching, seemed to have had more misses than hits with overseas recruitment and had a number of promising youngsters fail to spark. Could call that unlucky but ultimately as a club, we haven't helped ourselves
