No its not. That's what came out in your imagination.

What the UKBA investigation revealed was that six Australians were in the country on student visas which did now allow them to work. And yet they worked as professional rugby players.

No evidence of salary cap breaches.

No evidence that they were working as something else while pretending to be amateur players (in fact quite the opposite – they were deported for being employed and paid as rugby league players while on a visa which didn't allow them to work).

No amount of 'transparency' from the RFL would mean them backing up random imagined 'facts' that don't actually exist in the real world




Provide evidence to back that up, you're sailing dangerously close to libel

I will try to find a link but right now I'm a bit busy to be doing extensive googling.

Not too busy to be posting rumours, just too busy to back them up.

How convenient.

Meanwhile you might find this part of the Championship salary cap regulations interesting

It takes two minutes (or less) to reply to a post.

Googling rugby league subjects can take rather longer, especially when you are interested in a detail that the UKBA themselves weren't particularly interested in.

thats quite a transparent post tb

But if you 'know' this, and haven't just imagined it, you'll know where you know it from.


Or we can conclude that you've posted some unsubstantiated rumour and hope a random google search will provide evidence to back it up, even though you don't actually know if there is any.

Or perhaps he should just repeat it three times.

That makes it true automatically doesn't it tb?

Or is it just when YOU repeat something 3 times it becomes automatically true?

Just give me time. I'll try and do it this evening.

The thing is the players were deported because they were working illegally. It doesn't make any difference to the UKBA whether they were rugby players or picture framers and hence most reports don't beyond surface issues.

Speaking of unsubstantiated rumours... you still haven't backed up your assertion from the "Crusaders coming out of administration" thread with evidence. In fact you seem to be making a point of ignoring it



"tb wrote:Interestingly, what Crusaders haven't done, for example, is announce with no warning that the club is in administration leaving all their employees without jobs - which, coincidentally, is what Widnes did in October 2007. Widnes were allowed to reform, without their previous debts, and compete NL1 in 2008."

There you go. We all know how you love evidence to back up claims.

It's possible that the players who said they were left unemployed and signed for other clubs as free agents were lying, I suppose. If not likely.

And as for the reforming without the previous debts: that's what administration is.

I don't think it would make that much difference. Like any other Governing Body, Council or Government or referee they're never going to please all the people all the time. Admittedly they could do better in certain areas. For instance, when they released the results of the Franchise Applications they could have released the entire report, not one paragraph on each club. I think that in particular has caused a lot of problems and suspicion. On the whole they strike a fairly decent balance.

Look at the Gareth Thomas-Cas incident. Some folk seem to think it higlights how the RFL take a dim view of small Heartland clubs. Even despite him being the most famous Rugby player in world rugby at the time, despite him being on a BBC doc looking at homophobia, despite a well-known female sportcastor bagging RL live on air and despite Cas' previous history of crowd trouble, it was the RFL's fault.

I would imagine that the RFL and Cas had been working together to draw up plans for better crowd control. I also would imagine that a memo would have been sent out to all clubs saying the RFL are taking a zero tolerance policy on insults thrown at Gareth Thomas considering his media profile and the attention it had placed on the game.

Whether you think Cas or the RFL are right or wrong, I don't care. I don't want to open this up for a Cas discussion again and, no, I can't substantiate what I imagine had happened behind the scenes, but my point is that an awful lot happens behind the scenes that we don't really need to know about. If the RFL had sent a memo out to all clubs about zero tolerance, do we really need to know that and if they put it in a press release, how would that look to other sports and journalists that wanted to or already had bagged us?

Isn't the idea of administration to actually pay off at least [isome[/i of your creditors? You would only need to re-form a company after liquidation, wouldn't you?

Not entirely clued up on this by the way and happy to be proven wrong, but that's my understanding of the situation.

Note to Hedgehog, finding reference to it in the press which was where I read it ages ago is not classed as evidence on here

Ah, the fabled tb Book of Disingenuous Bollox.

I don't recall any mention of 'players' in your original post. You said 'employees'.

And you are plain wrong about administration.

I suppose at least it is an improvement on wrongly claiming (twice to my knowledge) that Widnes went into liquidation in 2007.

I would doubt ANYTHING the press wrote as fact, as would quite a few on here, because their "evidence" at times is dubious.

If it's what is called a pre-pack administration it is commonly done to sell a company without the debts while the company trades in administration. The potential unfairness to creditors is such that the Office of Fair Trading is looking into this area. A recent example was where Cobra entered into administration and was immediately bought by Coors. This allowed the brand to continue and saved jobs, but left suppliers out of pocket by £75 million, which one might think they weren't necesssarily happy about. Is this not reforming without debts?

Yes it is, but that's only one example.

The point I was making was that, following administration, it is entirely negotiable between the administrator and the prospective new buyer as to which (if any) creditors are repaid and how much. Hence the following quote, attributed to Nigel Wood, from Sporting Life regarding Crusaders administration

Well he's not "plain wrong" then. There is a commonly used form of administration which sees the creditors royally screwed.

Forgive me if this has been said in previous posts on this thread, couldn't be bothered to read em all!

Transparency from the RFL would sort out a great deal of the uncertainty (therefore all the slagging off) that we fans are put through.

IF the RFL just come out and state that we rely on SKY MONEY, like we all know they do, and Sky want expansion clubs in or else, then we would all know where we stand.

To sum up- Crusaders-Quinns-Catalans are in whatever they do, but the rest of the clubs have to abide by our rules.

Very unfair I know, but come Red Hall get some Bol**cks and tell us like it is.

No - they just change their operational rules on the sly to engineer a safe passage for their target clubs.

Fact me till I fart tb.

Google has revealed to me where I read it but unfortunately the source isn't available online.

Leighton Samuel did an interview in League Express (I think it was them if it wasn't then it was t'other trade paper) when the scandal broke in which he said that the players were paid by Dekor frame (as it was then) with the rest "made up by supporters".

Unless and until LE puts all its back issues online, I cannot give you a link to that interview. I can google up links to old forum threads where some people refer to the interview but I cannot get you the article itself.

I also seem to remember Leighton Samuel stating the RFL approached him and asked if he would back a club in Wales. It may even have been in the same article. Why they thought he'd treat league different to how he treated union god only knows.

Unfortunately rather too many people / parties behaved rather badly over the whole issue - Cardiff RFC, Lllanelli RFC, the WRU, Pontypridd RFC to name but a few. This gave LS the wriggle room to blame others and claim to be the innocent party.

Even within RL today, there are still some people who buy the line that LS was let down by the RFL, the South Wales business community, Brewery Field Ltd, flatcappers, WRU, the freemasons and it wasn't his fault.

Here's an interesting one. A certain "tb" was told of the interview in this thread and didn't reply to the post. m.rlfans.com/forums/viewtopic.ph ... &start=525

Here's an interesting one. A certain "tb" was told of the interview in this thread and didn't reply to the post. m.rlfans.com/forums/viewtopic.ph ... &start=525