In this week's Spirit of 55 column, Wire fan Rob Watson gives his views on the appointment of Daryl Powell as Warrington Wolves head coach on a three-year contract from 2022

NO coaching appointment in any sport can guarantee success, there are too many variables.

I for one though am happy with Daryl Powell being selected as the next Warrington Wolves head coach.

He is a coach that knows Super League and the British game as well as anybody and better than most.

Wherever he has coached he has made the team better.

At Leeds he was progressing the team and bringing through many of the players who would go on to be that club's ‘golden generation’, who brought the club their most successful period ever.

Later on, at Featherstone in the Championship he coached them to three successive table topping finishes, at a time when the licensing system kept them out of Super League.

Now at Cas he has made them consistently competitive and at times exceptional.

One clear reason for this success would seem to be his ability to help individual players to improve.

That might seem like the most basic requirement of a coach but is often not noticeable for many coaches at the top level.

Powell seems to consistently do this, including bringing local young players up to Super League standards.

Critics of his résumé would point to their not being a major trophy success on there.

I think that is harsh.

At Leeds he missed out on the Challenge Cup by the barest of margins and it could be argued had he been allowed to stay in his role, it would have been Powell rather than Tony Smith that ended the Rhinos' long wait for a Championship.

At Featherstone he had just about as much success as he could at a club that was not allowed into Super League.

Castleford are a club that have never won the Championship, so saying that Powell not winning one there makes him a bad coach is a flawed logic in my opinion.

Without question Castleford were the best side in Super League throughout the 2017 season, even though the title eluded them because they were ground down by Leeds in the Grand Final.

In virtually all of his seasons there Powell has kept Castleford somewhere between being contenders for the play-offs and title contenders.

To judge a coach purely on how many trophies he has won without factoring in which teams they have been coaching is a harsh way to judge.

Would Shaun Wane have won a Grand Final had he only ever coached at Castleford? We will never know for sure, but I doubt it.

The departures of players like Luke Gale, Denny Solomona and Wire’s own Daryl Clark shows that throughout Powell’s reign Cas have essentially been a feeder club for the Super League’s and rugby union’s elite.

Powell has had to reinvent his team a few times.

Throughout it all his teams have been one of the better teams in Super League to watch, with a willingness and ability from most, if not all players, to pass the ball.

Another positive sign for me is that his players usually seem to fully understand what is expected of them and their role in the team.

That, along with them being a side that are rarely out-enthused, is a sign to me that from his many years of coaching experience Powell has developed his own philosophy that he believes in and perhaps even more importantly is able to communicate that philosophy to his players and staff.

For a team that is so desperate to end the wait to be champions, maybe the perfect coach is one who is so well balanced – because he will have a chip on each shoulder from the time when he was ‘moved upstairs’ at Leeds after improving the team, the implication being that he was not a good enough coach to take them to the next level. He will be desperate to prove those people wrong.

I believe that he will have better resources at his disposal than he ever has, certainly since those days at Leeds, and he will be working incredibly hard that he and the club are capable of being champions.