[quote="NSW":2tevqggu]Be interesting what Danson does when the field and french era is over. Could he attract a top NRL player with a huge salary?[/quote:2tevqggu] It's a good question - in a way I almost hope that we wouldn't go down that route. If a top NRL player in his prime comes here then sadly it will all be driven by money. I think we'd be better off using the marquee spots to keep the best Wigan produced players here for the bulk of their careers, or to keep any future Australian gems that we've managed to polish at the club for more than a few years.

The level of bitterness between rugby and Latics fans has been on the slide for a decade or more, thankfully. The 2 sets of fans holding grudges and antagonising each other did neither team any favours, so hopefully it will soon be a thing of the past. If you go on the Latics forums you'll get some headbangers who are convinced anyone who supports Wigan RL is evil personified and is out to get them. I'm pretty sure after a few years of sensible stewardship from Danson most of them will accept he's moving them in the right direction and he is an improvement on anything they've had since Whelan

It might well be that a large salary will be required to get an NRL player over here. With the NRL expanding to PNG, NZ and Perth possibly in the next few years then those clubs are going to be looking for top quality players to add to their locally produced squad. If they are looking at squads of 25 players each then that is a lot of players who can further their careers in the NRL without having to leave the comp. The RFL/SL are going to have a look again at the criteria for SL status. Surely each SL club is going to have to prove they can produced their own squad. A move I'd have thought is that within two years of attaining SL status a club must have a scholarship, academy and reserves to complement the first team. That way each club will be capable of producing the required number for their first team squad. That would leave us less vulnerable to the need for overseas players to make up the SL quality squad which is the case now. How Mike Danson would look at quality overseas players and the salaries required remains to be seen. He will know better than us how much Latics soccer players earn for League One and Championship competitions. Compare than to the Wigan RL players who play in front of 15k each game then he might look quite favourably on Rugby League.

Hopefully we're already on the look out for more hidden gems, young players who haven't quite cracked first grade but will be good enough to make a decent career over here as well as putting themselves back in the NRL shop window. The way we've allowed our overseas players extra family time on a trust that they'll do a lot of the pre season hard work over there should be a good bargaining chip in our favour.

[quote="Stu M":3f2savwg]Come on Jason you’ll have to do better than that. How are Liverpool women bossing us around when they pay to play there? They call it the St Helens Stadium because they don’t want to be associated with a vaping company. No issues with that given the name hasn’t changed for rugby league and it is still OUR stadium that we own. They pay a good fee to play there, we earn from food and drink and more importantly they paid over £1m for a state of the art pitch that we play on. It’s superb quality. So if that’s “bossing” us around then that will do me.[/quote:3f2savwg] Out of interest, how much do they pay to play at the stadium?