Whinos fan here.
The lad looks back to his best this season. Brilliant player.
Do you think he was allowed to leave too soon?
Are the Marquee players he was replaced with any better?
I'm genuinely interested......

He wanted to leave. Personally I'd have kept him and he would still be the England/GB #1

I’d love to have had him as our 7.

I would have kept him but he was ready to move on a try something else, fair play to him

Still the best english fullback in Superleague.

Yeah by a mile too. Can't believe the likes of Widdop and Ratchford were picked ahead of him......

At the time I was worried about investing so much in someone with such a poor injury record. In hindsight we would have been better keeping him on. That's true on the field at least, I can't imagine it would have helped us businesswise (we already made a loss even after getting him off the books).

Players like Sam put bums on seats and win trophies.

It's a nice theory about big names increasing ticket sales but realistically I don't think that happens for us. We just signed the reigning Man of Steel and another big name marquee player yet attendances and season ticket sales appear to be static. Granted if he had helped us make a final, that would have helped financially.

We start winning games and crowds will increase

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Yeah but I would swap both of those players for Tomkins!

Who would you have now though - Tomkins or French?

Wane being put in charge of the national side must be a huge motivator for Tomkins. His treatment by Bennett was pretty poor IMO. Excellent in the Kiwi series of 2018 and then dropped to the nines squad for 2019.

Tomkins at HB with Hastings, but if we'd pulled that off even I'd be questioning our salary cap

id be thinking we had lost ours and pinched Warringtons

.... yet they decreased when we started winning trophies? Again it's a nice theory, but it doesn't happen in reality. I don't have the answer how to fix crowds but I think it's been proven that winning games and signing big names have little/no effect.

I was just about to write something similar,all too easy to blithely say star names attract crowds..I feel though is it a case the town has fallen out of love with the sport,for now at least?

As for Sam he looked on fire the other night shame we didn’t really get value for money on his return.

The crap setup is what dropped crowds. People paying for a ST when they didn't knoe half the fixtures.

So not winning.g more games then?

Won it twice in thev3 years he came back for, and before anyone says, if he doesn't play middle part of 2016 we dont win it 2016.
He practically won us 3 games middle of that year and then if you look at his last game Wolfs away he was fantastic and created 3/4 tries.

I appreciate he didnt play semi and final. But co suffering the injury he came back from he was still pretty good, safe athe back and under the high ball and occasional flashes of class that won us games when needed.

PS

Hes on roughly the same money he was offered at Wigan, yet he takes far more home due to Tax differences in France.
We couldn't compete realistically (and that's before the lifestyle etx and other reasons he wanted to go for).

I thought that the rates were pretty similar for a higher earner. Over E73 K it is 41% and over E156 it is 45%.

We just signed the reigning Man of Steel who in reality is a player no NRL club wanted and another big name marquee player, Who was obviously finished at NRL level hence coming to SL, It's not like we signed Cherry-Evans & Waerea-Hargreaves is it

What's your point? Realistically that calibre of player is out of reach for SL teams. Hastings and Burgess are our biggest pair of signings in a single season for over a decade, and as big as any SL club is going to get unless something drastic changes. If they haven't increased attendances, then unfortunately you can safely say that big SL signings won't 'put bums on seats'.

Got to be careful here, but all I can say is I can only believe the persons saying this. There are numerous other posters on this forum who were there and/or have been told the same thing by the same person.

Last year London game away we worked it out and it was close to 100k a year difference.

Whether its true or not tax wise I know for certain that Tomkins and the family wanted to go.
Good luck to them

The tax rate is impacted/reduced by having Children, I am told this by someone who lives there.