MurphysLaw wrote: ↑Thu Feb 27, 2020 3:19 pm
The RFU has announced that England will play Tonga in the Autumn, which when you add in games against New Zealand, Argentina and Australia means that England players will be away from their clubs for the whole of November, and probably a week or two beforehand. (we may also lose players such as Lavanini,. Veainu and Kalafamoni for at least some of this period).
While also second guessing any changes to immigration rules, it seems to be increasingly difficult to get recruitment and player retention right.
However, some clubs seem to manage to limit the impact - Exeter, Bris, Irish, Quins, Worcs, Glos? - whilst Tigers continue to struggle. Difficult decisions ahead.....
Simplest way to do that is using academy graduates to fill out squad depth. Tigers have largely failed to do so for a few years, hence ended up overpaying for squad depth in my opinion.
The work Tom Harrison (amongst several others of course) has done with the academy is outstanding. We need to start capitalising on that infrastructure again.
2019 Dev squad promotions - Whitcombe, Martin, Manz, Eveleigh, Ashworth, JvP, Costelow (
), Gilliland, Browning, Steward
Potential 2020 Dev squad promotions - Noumey, Vanes, Rowntree, Illione, Muncaster, Kit Smith, Edwards, Titcombe, Potts, Lugsden, Ollie Smith v2
The vein of talent coming through is fantastic. In the backs where players can progress a bit quicker I'd hope to see all ofJvP, Browning and Steward feature next season.
Re-signings such as Smith, Lavin and Gough are important as they will cost very little in the short term but have the potential to save vital cap space in the long run. In those 3 players we have squad cover across the entire back row with differing skill sets. With Sam Eveleigh turning 20 next season and the very impressive Illione, Kit Smith and Muncaster about to leave school I hope the club take a punt on these kids rather than signing squad back rowers. At the very most a 1 year contract for Boladau, who has been good for us when he's had game time.
Hopefully backing these kids can provide the cap space to make fewer signing overall but sign more first XV quality players (Alemanno, Nadolo and Moriarty for instance...) rather than having a squad with too many second XV players in it.