Quote morrisseyisawire="morrisseyisawire"Vaguely depressing isn't it? For all our cheap digs at Shaun Wane during his tenure at Wigan, he did wonders for the career of several promising youngsters.
I wonder how many would have followed this well worn path if they'd been with us, and similarly whether the careers of Patton, O'Brien, Moran, Smith etc. would have flourished more under his tutorage.
Time to uncork the Harvey's Bristol Cream again I think.'"
Those players would have not got the game time in the first team at Wigan that they did at Warrington, because there would have been better home grown players ahead of them coming out of the Wigan Academy. They would have got moved on, like Matty Russell did.
Wigan have loads of failures in terms of their youth players as well. The difference is they have the volume to ensure that they get a handful of hits, and that's all you really need. If over a 5 year period you can produce 4 international calibre players you have done superbly well and have a core of players that you can keep in your team for a decade.
There's often a theory that Wire produce lots of talent but then don't know what to do with it when it gets in the first team. If that were the case, other clubs would have picked them up and they would have thrived there, and we'd have a list of "ones that got away". But we don't, they all go off to lower SL clubs or Championship clubs and then fade away. The problem for us seems to start further back, we don't have the talent coming through in the first place.