THE young lads who have stepped up to Super League this year have done exceptionally well.

All of a sudden there have been three or four lads from Warrington getting game time and it's an area in which the club are going to continue going forward, by bringing more players through the ranks.

I think it's so important to see our teams from under 12s through to under 16s beating the likes of Wigan's and St Helens' town teams.

It was never heard of when I was a Warrington schoolboy - we were always the whipping boys.

I was lucky that my junior school (Beamont) played rugby league - it was one of the few in the town.

But in the space of five to 10 years the community team and the coaching staff have turned it around.

It's nice to see now that virtually every school, no matter how remote in Warrington, is trying to play rugby at some sort of level - whether it's girls, boys, mixed or tag.

And, at the end of last week, our under 16s team set off on a tour of Australia.

When I went Down Under with the Great Britain Academy team in 1994, it helped me not just as a rugby player but as a person.

A tour like that, being away from home, teaches you to be responsible for yourself at that age. You see different cultures, different clubs, different training methods, and you learn to be part of a team and gelling together.

That type of experience is invaluable and the guys on the under 16s tour - even if they don't go on to make it in the first team - will become better people for experiencing the trip.

It seems a long time since those school days for me, especially with me making my 200th first-team appearance for Wolves against Wigan two weeks ago.

That's a big achievement for me and I think I'm nearly up to 300 career games when my years at Salford are included too.

There are not going to be many in the modern game that go beyond 300 games because of the amount of games the league has been reduced to.

You're lucky to play 28 games per season now, whereas years gone by have involved 40-plus games.

So, 200 games and I've still not got to a major final or won a play-off game. That's still my personal goal and the team's goal too.

Friday at Bradford was a blip. The beauty of Super League is that we've got another week this week to put it all right again.

We'll always look at the positives from the game and at Bradford it was how well we kept the ball and came back.

We showed a lot of spirit in the second half after trailing 32-6 at half time.

We could have easily just thrown in the towel as teams have previously done there and ended up with a 60-0 hiding.

We didn't do that. We really dug in and took the game to them, but in the end the amount of tackling we did in the first half took its toll on us and we conceded two late tries.