And you could justify doing that in exactly the same way HullKA fans have justified their failure to meet the quota targets the RFL have set for them.

That would be a good excuse if you had lots of young players in the squad, but you dont, you have a fairly ageing squad.

Even though the rules are a watered down version of what was intended due to legal challenges from players, among them yours? Even though the rules arent there to restrict clubs but for the long-term future of the game.

Would you be happy if a club had found a way around the salary cap, something not within the rules but clearly against what was intended, they then used that 'loophole' to employ more players on higher wages than they would be allowed?

And the are also taking one of the limited SL spots away from a young british player

they could have done, I'anson did this year, Hull KA were competitive. So, in the meantime, if your academy is producing them, you should be looking elsewhere in Britain for young british players.

So HullKA, in their 5th year, are still needing, and using an overseas player dispensation. Thats pretty poor isnt it.
would you be surprised if Lovegrove played for another 10 years? which would mean HullKA have dispensation for their first 15 years of SL. Which should rightly be derided. HullKA have an option of avoiding this criticism. Do what everyone else has done.

no, its a reflection on, and contribution to the league, of which they are a constituent part.

It is integral to the sustainability and health of the league as a whole and clubs as constituent parts of it, that we rely on british players, not overseas players. The fact that more than half of your match day squad came through the NRL development system is a reflection on you and your contribution to something you are a part of.

So we should so away with the Salary Cap then shouldnt we.

you havent answered the question Bill,

ill post it again for you.


you can answer it and converse with the adults, or you can try and find more sentences to take out of context to fool the bottom feeders. Its up to you

ooh, is that straw-man Bill. You are on a roll here. first losing the sense of context, then a straw-man, what next you forget scale exists and we can have a Bill home run?

St's and Wigan didnt have a Tomkins or an Eastmond ready to step up. They had to go out, find a young player, train him, then give him the shot to prove he was ready. Something Tomkins didnt do immediately.

To have a Tomkins and an Eastmond you need to give them the opportunity to prove they are a Tomkins and an Eastmond. I have seen hundreds of next-big-things at academy level disappear, and nobodies at academy level like Peacock and Ellis have fantastic careers. Nobody knows how anyone will do as a regular first team player until they are given the opportunity to be regular first team players, You arent giving them that opportunity.

And it is still a gamble, and that gamble should be taken, and that opportunity given to young british players rather than NRL no-marks.

So you are saying you cant form your own opinion, you just blindly follow Justin Morgan. Well that does explain a lot.

no, your not, though apparently you have all the same opinions.

So suddenly the only players HullKA can sign in Britain are fringe players from teams who finished in the bottom half of the league? can I ask why?
And?
Hull KA are, thats why they need 10 overseas players which is an appalling total for a supposed heartland club.

top 30, but no, i dont want them to go to Aus. If they did they would likely be more competitive at international level. However it would be a short-term boom, we will never catch up to the strength of the NRL which feeds the strength of the Australian and Kiwi national sides by sending our best players over there.
its irrelevant someone has to finish bottom.

so you are 2 years behind. And the fact they have been here so long just shows that you have had your weaknesses highlighted and done nothing about it.
you have kind of answered your own question.
no, it is the clubs fault.

I said he was never an international centre.

wakefields won the comp the year before didnt they? looks like that is definate proof of success at first team. Or maybe not. Good for the young lads though, irrelevant to everyone else

so then why are Hull able to be introducing youngsters right now, but HullKA are failing to do so?

so you are simply benefiting from having more overseas players, which isnt really fair on the clubs who did what we asked them to do. Bradford for instance released Simon Finnegan to comply with the regulations only for him to then be declared exempt.

thats life. you could, i dont know, bring in some good british players? maybe put out a good team of good british players?

i would have liked clubs to at least try and hit the targets for overseas quotas they themselves set, rather than do everything in their power, exploring legal avenues simply to deny british youngsters the chance of reaching their potential so they could buy in more overseas players in an attempt to take a short-cut to success to the detriment of the long term health of the sport in this country.

If the cap was modified randomly and unevenly and everybody was exploiting that to their benefit, I would expect Rovers to do the same.




I really wanted I'anson to make the 6 shirt his own. It would have been great for Hull KR to have another club-trained player step into one of the senior squad spots. But he didn't. He wasn't bad, he was just a bit anonymous. It put a lot of pressure on Dobson. He could have maybe carried on as a squad player, but better to give that squad spot to a younger player and the frontline role to a better one - which hopefully Green is. The elsewhere in Britain, I'll cover in my response to Mrs B.



Lovegrove doesn't now require the dispensation he was given. According to the Retconned rules his youth and the timing of his emergence make him club- and fed-trained now. I think. If you want to call it a dispensation, it applies to Lovegrove and not the club. Initially his dispensation was limited to our club, which was a bit ridiculous. We're not fussed about avoiding the criticism of trolls - it may as well be this as something else. And we have done what most everybody else has done - used all our non-fed and quota spots.



I see it more as a reflection on the superiority of the NRL's development system. Now, I see your point that it'll never get better here if kids aren't given a shot. This makes some assumptions that I think are far from certain to be true, but it is worth checking. The crucial thing here isn't to prolong the careers of mature, middling products of our discredited system (assuming the system isn't doing a perfectly reasonable job with the materials available to it), but to make sure every club includes a number of promising players in their full-time squad. The overseas quota maximum isn't the important one here, the club-trained minimum is.

Some fair points there. What I disagree about is seeing the signings of Sharp and Westerman, or potentially Myler and Robinson as 'virtuous' and for the good of the sport rather than the good of Hull FC (which I think they are / would be, btw). They are all established SL players - 3 of them have played for England. Buying them just moves the deckchairs around. If Quins and Cas promote kids rather than signing experienced replacements then that is good, but the virtue is their's rather Hull's. And they can mull that while watching Hull FC in the play-offs next September.

The difference I admit is for a player like Briggs who is outside of SL. He's better off playing at Fev than watching Long and Horne from the stands, IMO (see also players like Ian Hardman and good number of others). But we could have offered him the 6 shirt. If he is as good as Green we definately should have (it would have freed up a quota space

). If he is no better than I'anson, he needs to improve before stepping up.

Defending Hull KR. 1. I am just biassed. 2. Some people (

) work hard to attack them, so there is plenty of opportunity. 3. In recent years things have improved astonishingly - with Digger, I think we exceed our resultant negativity quotient.

double post.

Except for the 10 that have played for our Academy and the First Team since we got promoted you mean

rubbish, majority of our squad are 23-27 yrs old. although by the very nature of nature you could of course describe it as an "ageing" squad!

Salary cap is nothing to do with overseas quota , HTH

right here you go this is the teams age 28x2 23x3 27x2 26x2 24x4 25x2 29x2 32x1 30x2 33x1 21x4 20x2 not including hall or green now if this is a ageing team i feel very old at 26 www.superleague.co.uk/club.php?id=33512 for those who want to check

right here you go this is the teams age 28x2 23x3 27x2 26x2 24x4 25x2 29x2 32x1 30x2 33x1 21x4 20x2 not including hall or green now if this is a ageing team i feel very old at 26 www.superleague.co.uk/club.php?id=33512 for those who want to check

Excuse me. Nothing under 48 is "fairly ageing".

Let's be clear on this.

Each club is charged with 3 strands to their recruitment - homegrown, British and overseas. IMO FC are doing OK on all three. We have 13 homegrown players in our squad. From a British perspective, the acquisition of young British talent from Harlequins and Castleford, highly likely to both get starting spots at a bigger club that in theory has a better chance of giving them play-off experience, and to work with the likes of Fitzgibbon is helping the British game, arguably. From an overseas POV as said, I'm fine with the players we have so far but don't see the point of Rovelli.


I'd love FC to have gone for someone like Briggs. Long, I'm sure, could bring someone like him on. Maybe he'll impart some wisdom to Rovelli, but since he's already 27 the opportunity you'd expect would be more limited.


Fine to defend KR. I just think getting on for 50 pages is silly, when it's obvious that 10 is too many. I'm happy to say that the 6 we have is too many and 7 would be worse - I'm happy that we've invested well in our 5 top overseas players and could leave it at that. Defending 10 is just arguing for the sake of it and I suspect you recognise that really.

Wow 10 in the last 5 years well done. How many of them are still with you and have gone on to be first-choice first teamers?

Obviously maths isn't your strong point but it's been four seasons 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010

Go on then in the same timescale how many players have played for both Hulls Academy and the first team then we know just how far we are behind you?

Whats the point your trying to get accross ?

Initially 10 foreigners in a first choice 17 is shocking, now 1 player who came through your academy in your first choice 17 is shocking.

Why is it ?

Because the development of the English game is more important than any one team trying (and failing) to get a massive advantage by exploiting every loop hole in the world.

To grow Rugby League we obviously need the wider public to take a greater interest a great way to get that is by having a winning England team - it was obvious what England RU winning the WC did for them in terms of publicity. The England football side is faltering as is the England RU, RL has a decent chance to step up to the plate.

I'd also personally like to see my country win against Australlia. While I don't think Justin Morgan should care been an Aussie and a big Aussie lover you'd hope that the ones in charge at Hull KR could see how poor it is for them in the long term. It's so short sighted it's unreal, in the last 5 years the best teams have arguably been Hull, Saints, Wigan and Leeds all of which have the best academys, just look at the succesful Saints/Leeds teams who had a massive English core not a few Aussie rejects.

So it's Hull KRs fault england/GB have been crap for the last 40 years

No, it's the fault of the teams in the league as a whole who are very self centred in their club development.. Hull KR are just the worst offenders at this time.

The fact that you think Hull Fc have been in the top 4 teams (notice the word is teams not clubs) pretty much blows your objectivity (sp) out of the water bye bye.

The clubs look after themselves at the end of the day and if the powers that be say its ok then its the clubs perogative to sign the best players they think are available to them.

The problem is the RFL and its lack of bottle in applying rules in any facet or form


Hull haven't signed Westerman to benefit England much like they aren't after Rovelli to weaken England