by Ian Royal »
23 Sep 2011 11:37
Hoop Blah ZacNaloen obviously never materialised into the player we hoped.
That was just a one off though....
I think there's a big difference between taking a punt on a youngster, say 19 or under and putting them into the academy where we all know the hit rate is going to be something low like 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 odd. Nothing wrong with that.
It's the older punts like Sodje, Bennett, Mooney, Antonio, Baseya etc where a lot of the early development's been done already and they still aren't that good yet. They tend to cost more, have less chance of progressing significantly and tend to be more difficult to ship out, costing more in wages too.
In fact, off the top of my head I can't think of many of these sorts of punts that have worked... Federici, Sonko & Hunt maybe? And Federici wasn't so much of a punt by us as just hung around until we gave in and kept him.