I was surprised that the attendances remain reasonably healthy, especially as the weather has been atrocious.

Maybe a coach who thrives where, with all due respect, expectations aren't as high. He'd be under pressure from some here from 5 games in.

Does anyone subscribe to League plus. Rhinos have been the featured match 6 out of 7 rounds. So there games have not been available for 48hrs or sometimes longer….complete waste of time/money. I subscribed as I do not have Sky and due to health issues have not been able to attend away games and all but one home game.Very disappointed won’t subscribe again.

All coaches here are under pressure from game 1 here some even before a game has been played. That’s what we are good at on here!!

Played well above his weight as a player and with limited resources is proving to be quite astute in finding good players and galvanising them and the team as a whole seem to perform well for each other a good modus operandi,arguably the best British coach at the moment on a shoe string.

Good Coaches ?

Agar was a failure wherever he coached
Furner was an assistant and then had a failure as a head coach
Smith was an assistant and then head coach in the Queensland cup comp

So no coaches out of the last three that could ever be said to be good coaches

Compare our appointments to Saints appointments and tell me again why they are light years better than we are over the last 10 years.

Correct.

I remember posters saying the same about Watson.FWIW I do rate Rowley.

Agar coached us to a CC, and Smith got us to a GF. They weren't, and aren't necessarily bad coaches. Timing seems to have more of an impact as much as anything else. Sometimes, you can have a good coach, but they're not the right person for the job at that particular time.

You have to have an enormous dose of luck with these things. Smith came highly recommended by loads of people, including Chev Walker who talked him up. Not all coaches and playing groups match for whatever reason. Sts have appointed both Holbrook and Woolf, who had similar reps to Smith, but have worked out much better for Saints.

There can definitely be a bias that the grass is always greener on the other side. For me though, a coach like Rowley seems to get the most out of his players and improves them, coaches a really attractive brand and manages to get a small pack to play with aggression. Smith hasn't managed any of those for me in the last two seasons (especially improving players).

Brian McDermott won more individually than each of those Saints coaches, and now is in the NRL.

It's not as simple as getting the coaching appointment right and success follows shortly.

The best Saints player is Welsby, who came through their own academy system, with a significant number of the rest of their squad. We're still playing catch-up with youth development to the likes of Saints and Wigan, and paying a premium in tranfer fees for signings as well as salaries to compensate.

I don't think we're in the same position as we were at the end of 2003. Maybe in a few years if the talented kids keep coming through.

If we're lucky we might emulate the Murray era team, but we don't seem to have the forwards. Bentley may be tough but he ain't Marc Glanville