My fellow Ospreyslians, where do we sit as a club/region etc? Well recent results have exposed the serious issues we still suffer from, our first choice 23 is theoretically the best it has been for some time....but get beneath that and we have a bit of a mess with a raft of limited players, bad players and talented but injury prone players.
The coaching team are rather weak as well, defence being the most obvious. This seems to have been noticed by the higher ups.
Seeing the post game interview with Toby Booth from yesterday he seems pretty clear he seems to think we need a lot of work, and that this is going to be largely solved by bringing in youngsters. To be honest I think he is wrong, our production line of players is far too patchy for that. We need to look outside of Wales for some kind of solution.
Now yes I am worried by these issues BUT, that we seem to have at least partly understood them is a bit of a relief. After a decade of just ignoring problems when they arose we at least react to setbacks, if a bit slowly. This gives me some hope.
How does everyone else feel about where we are?
Any news on the Mike Ruddock zoom meeting for trust members that was mentioned a little while back.
That would be a chance for questions to be asked on the university project he alluded to a while back plus the progression of a more professional academy structure which he also mentioned a while back.
Booth mentioned in his post match interview that there were things going on behind the scenes which would allow the regions to become effective but were certain,y not quick fixes… any ideas apart from the super regions route?
It does look like the new owners are putting the off field structures into a lot more professional footing. I hope all the work they are doing off field translates to the team/squad strength sooner rather than later.
I think booth was more stating the fact that they have to develop youngsters out of necessity rather than choice, (due to inferior budgets), to plug the gaps in the squad.
The squad make up is a disaster 10 years in the making and, when you consider budgetary restraints, will likely take 5 years rather than the more ambitious 3 years to fix. None of this is booths fault. our coaches, outside booth and dunc, probably need looking at and more proven operators brought in.
Real plusses of the last couple of years are the fact that we now have management on the business side who actually know what they’re doing, and ruddock seems to be putting in a far more cohesive development pathway that should hopefully bare fruit in the future.
Hopefully this can be a good and constructive thread. The most important quality to have is persistence. Keep coming back and don't give up. In an ideal world, which sadly we are not in, you buy your way out of the problem but even that does not always work. So the production line becomes very important. There is no doubt the locality cannot sustain the quality of production line so it has to be extended. It should be borne in mind that three of the young players who have hit the first team squad this year are Hickey Nagy and Sutton. All have come from outside the locality. The key to making the production line more robust is to work with the University to build an academy of excellence and attract players into the pipeline. The talent levels are far higher outside Wales than they are inside it so the chances of other sides not picking up talent are greater than the chances of us missing it. So we need in my view to increase the quality of our scouting team to ensure we are picking up talent from a very wide pool and continue to work very closely with the University.
As to the short term you simply have to look at whether you have the right mix of specialist coaching skills and expertise and you have to prune weak links ruthlessly and identify which older players are still performing and which are not. Once your legs have gone they don't come back.