FORGET Newcastle and forget the Wests Tigers. They might be anchoring the NRL table but they’re not the biggest disappointment in rugby league this year.

That honour goes to the New Zealand Warriors.

We know Gold Coast has slipped following its 2016 heroics, the Bulldogs’ attack is woeful, the Tigers have been a basket-case off the field and the Knights have won just four games all season, but still Warriors fans have more reason to cry foul than anyone else.

Sitting 12th with seven wins from 20 matches, so much more was expected of the men across the ditch. Their spine — comprising the four most important positions on the field in fullback, halfback, five-eighth and hooker — is full of internationals.

Roger Tuivasa-Sheck became the club’s No. 1 in 2016 after it signed him on a deal reportedly worth more than $800,000 a season. Halfback Shaun Johnson has played more than 20 Tests for the Kiwis, rake Issac Luke boasts more than 30 international caps and guided Souths to a grand final in 2014 and Kieran Foran wears the No. 6 jersey. On paper, it’s one of the strongest spines in the competition.

That’s a helluva quartet to snare under the constraint of a $7 million salary cap, but their performances haven’t matched the pay cheques.

Tuivasa-Sheck has largely been impressive at the back and Foran’s impact on the team was noticeable in the early stages before dropping off. But Luke hasn’t come close to replicating the form that made him one of the competition’s leading dummy-halves at the Rabbitohs and Johnson has too often drifted in and out of games.

A humbling 34-22 loss at home to the Panthers in Round 19 when Penrith’s teenage halfback Nathan Cleary carved them up single-handedly showed just how low the Kiwi club had sunk.

“They’ve got Roger Tuivasa-Sheck, they’ve got Issac Luke, they’ve got Kieran Foran, they’ve got Shaun Johnson. The Panthers had Nathan Cleary, a young kid, and he gave them a bath,” Matthew Johns said on the Triple M Grill Team after that loss.

“The worst rap a club can have is that when players go there, they get worse. Roger was on the cusp of being the best player in the competition and he’s gone there and gone backwards. Issac Luke has gone backwards. Foran was fantastic to start with but now he’s paddling.”

Life has only got worse since then, losing the next three games. The Warriors last tasted success in their seven-point win over the struggling Bulldogs in Round 16 and on the back of the club’s defeat to bottom-placed Newcastle on the weekend, coach Stephen Kearney accused some players of not trying.

“There were some guys out there trying very hard and there were some guys that weren’t,” Kearney said. “There were some individuals whose effort was very questionable and in this competition you can’t have that.”

The Warriors have been missing Johnson, who suffered a knee injury in July, but the rot started well before that. So while it’s a mitigating factor in the club’s late-season slide, it can’t be used as an excuse for the mediocrity of the entire year.

On NRL 360 last week former Queensland five-eighth Ben Ikin expressed the exasperation plenty of league followers feel when trying to understand the Warriors’ predicament.

“I struggle to get my head around what’s happened in New Zealand this year,” Ikin said.

“They’ve got a world class spine, they’ve got people of the ilk of Simon Mannering and Ryan Hoffman (in the back row) and I just look at the team play and I am left scratching my head.

“There’s not too many good judges in rugby league that didn’t have the Warriors getting close to the top four with the group of people they had assembled.”

What really boggles the mind is the amount of talent the Warriors have in their under-age set-ups. They’ve won three Holden Cup Under-20 titles in nine years but that talent clearly isn’t being nurtured properly.

Last week Dale Budge wrote a column for the New Zealand Herald saying the Warriors’ roster, outside of the spine, simply isn’t up to NRL standard, which is the result of poor player development.

“When you look through the 2017 roster there are a number of players commanding big chunks of (salary) cap space that haven’t delivered true value on their contract — Manu Vatuvei, Ben Matulino, Issac Luke, Jacob Lillyman, Shaun Johnson and Ryan Hoffman to name a few obvious ones,” Budge wrote.

“Problem is the development has been terrible and that is the key reason why the Warriors haven’t enjoyed more success in recent years. The Warriors have been a development club that simply hasn’t spat out NRL-ready first graders, which is the key way to balance your roster and manage your salary cap.

“The reality is the Warriors actually haven’t poured enough resources into player development at a lower level. They haven’t recruited the best types of juniors and there have been far too many kids ‘filling jerseys’ rather than actually being part of the long-term solution.”

So when the club promotes its locally-grown talent to first grade, the players struggle to make the step up. When it recruits players from other clubs, they don’t get what they paid for. It’s a vicious cycle, and one Warriors fans will desperately hope ends soon.