Wires71:BarbedWire2:
Sam might not be the answer, but of the past failures, Smith and Price both did so much more without ever going through the complete collapse of 2022.
One could argue Smith taking us into the bottom 4 playoffs with championship sides was pretty rank.
Price was great in his 1st year, and a complete failure in his following three. He has never been a head coach since.
Smith, absolutely. He missed the play offs (direct equivalent) and ultimately there was no green shoot of recovery in that team. He paid for it with his job.
Price’s ‘failure’ compared to what had come since actually doesn’t look too bad. I’m not advocating for him, and wouldn’t want him back, but from where we were on season debrief of 2021, to where we were at debrief of 2022, proved the point really. We had tantrums about being knocked out at home against Hull Kr in the playoffs, and relied on scraping past Toulouse to remain in the top flight.
While this season hasn’t been good enough, and it’s not, we can’t judge former seasons differently because the coach got Cas to a grand final a few years ago and stopped Mike Cooper selling T-shirts. It was a failure, by every metric and almost everyone brought in during that period is now gone, Harrison and Dufty aside (Vaughan at seasons end). And that is actually really haunting, given the list includes but not limited to Minikin, Russell, Matautia, Holmes, Kasiano, Dudson, McGuire, Magoulias, Nicholson, Bullock, Drinkwater, Wardle. Add that to the players that left during that period, Hill, Cooper, Charnley, Widdop, Hughes, Mulhearn, Davis, Clark, Dean, Longstaff…
That’s 20+ players gone since Price left in 2022. And I’d argue the second list is a better list of players than the first, 4 of them have gone on to represent England since leaving us as scrap.
