Originally Posted by
Gray77
This echoes what I said on another thread a couple of weeks ago, and I was roundly called an idiot for daring to criticise Anderson because ‘he won the lot’ basically. 2006 was a dominant year, but it wasn’t as exciting as 2005 and nowhere near as fun as the sides that won the league 5 years earlier. Anderson, Maguire, Brown and coaches like that came over here and changed the game into a coaching style that they had grown up with in Australia, and most clubs (definitely ours and Wigan) went full in with it, hence us trying to replace Anderson with Potter who came from a similar school of coaching. It set us back a decade because once the superstars of the 2000s disappeared we underachieved playing a terrible brand of RL that couldn’t cut the mustard without the best players.
Wigan did the same and Wane tried to emulate Maguire and his success, but look at Wigan’s crowds now. Thousands have walked away because of the style of RL. Thousands that came to LP in those opening few months of 2012 didn’t opt to come back because of the style of RL as well. People can talk about what we won in 2006 but what about the decade after it when we wasted the chance to bring thousands back to the club with the new stadium because we made terrible coaching appointments. Only when Holbrook turned up did I start to believe that the club had realised it had made mistakes, but the appointment of Woolf confirmed they hadn’t.
Woolf is a very very good coach, you see our defence and know the fella knows his stuff, but did we win the league because of him or because we have the best team, a team that developed and regained its big game mentality under Holbrook. Some will say we won the GF primarily because of Woolf, that’s fair enough, but IMO we played Wigan at their own game when we could have beaten them another way. It’s a debate, and we’ve had it on here many times.
End of the day, I think Woolf will walk away with a lot more than just his one GF he has so far, and a lot of people will be more than happy with that and Woolf will deserve the credit because trophies outstrip all other concerns. But I think this team would have won trophies with another coach, and of course it did under the last one, and I enjoyed it a lot more then as well. I never worry about this current teams abilities to win stuff, but I worry about stuff in the mid to long term because as you say, the weekly rounds are so lacking in importance we end up with boring RL attracting 10-11k instead of 13-14k which does us no good. And if the team starts to dip in the next 3-4 years how will we look if we’ve not capitalised on our abilities to attract as many fans into LP as possible when we were actually winning league titles?