Phil Gould

Talent isn't the be all and end all of what have you.

It goes to the DNA and the club that we want to be.

And I think that's probably why we've surprised a lot of people over the last couple of years with our performances because we picked good people before what people would see as natural talent.

and they've done a wonderful job for us.

And that's been a process.

We don't recruit anyone into our club unless we've got a full character and personality reference.

We've looked into their history both as a player.

For kids, we look at their schooling and we look at their education and we look at their home life and all those sorts of things as well.

And the same when you're going, you know, we've had to buy a lot of players into our top 30 the last couple of years.

The system hopefully is that you have to do less and less of that as time goes on You start producing your own and your kids come through your system and and go from there so Yeah, there's a whole process to it and they've got to tick every box, but before we then agree Well, this is okay.

That very rarely happens.

That very rarely happens.

It's not the disagreement you're thinking of.

We might have different opinions on players and strengths and all that sort of thing.

But in the end, is it right for the club?

Is it right for this team at this time?

That's what we do.

And it's usually an alignment based off those characteristics.

Absolutely.

By the time we've got to that process, we've either convinced each other that this is the right thing to do or not the right thing to do.