Warriors need new

Squad’s revival at hands of a new owner must begin with an accessible location

These are forlorn days out Penrose way, where the home part of the season ended, appropriately enough, with their 53rd loss in a row. At least that’s what it feels like. The Warriors’ problems are myriad and include a sale process that looks like it was drawn up on the back of a beer mat at 3am.

They include a whole bunch of players on the books who are below first-grade standard and few on the horizon to pin hopes upon.

Their recruitment is hamstrung by the 2200km-wide strip of water separating them from the league heartlands of Sydney and Brisbane. As such they overpay for veterans looking for a last decent contract (Ryan Hoffman), or take a punt on unproven talent who, if they play well enough, will cut and run as soon as the next Sydney club comes calling (James Maloney and Chad Townsend).

No Australian in their early prime wants to play at the Warriors. Fact. The Warriors have been poor at transitioning decent juniors into firstgrade stars. Another sad fact. Even their best players, their internationals, have well-documented flaws. Add those three facts together and you have a failsafe recipe for 13th.

This is a grim picture, but it gets worse: the Warriors, version 2017, are joy-sappingly boring. They’re paintby-numbers; they’re a Round Wine instead of a Tim Tam.

They’re in the bottom four in points scored, bottom five in tries, bottom seven in linebreaks and bottom three in offloads. They kick the ball more than any other team and make bugger-all errors — only Manly have made fewer — which just goes to show how fatuous the whole completed-sets stats craze is.

To summarise their on-field efforts you could say they’re talent deficient, tedious and . . . ordinary.

But the squad and coaching is not even the area that is in most acute need of addressing.

For as long as they pitch their tent at Mt Smart they are doomed to indifference. The average Warriors crowd this year will come in a tick under 12,000. This is an unscientific observation but there must be about 8000 diehard Warriors fans who miss games only through illness or family bereavement.

The club has 17,800 members, give or take a train carriage or two.

So there are a lot of casual fans who just won’t go to Mt Smart. Don’t blame them for a minute.

The field is fine, the