Sad loss for our game. Our league will soon be full of talentless players such as Ryan Bailey.

Lomax, Sam Tomkins, Tom Briscoe etc.... Will all be targeted in my opinion.

How old do you think Joel is? He IS a young player.



The transfer fee is useless. There is no one to buy and no one is selling.



JT is an England Internationals and forms a back row at Wigan with HH and Lockers that is one of the best in the league. With Hoffman gone JT it was the obvious move to put him back in the pack where he is not merely good but an outstanding player - much better than he is a centre. The idea he can easily be replaced is simply not true.

Precisely.

This isn't an isolated incident, and it needs to be looked at and evaluated as a growing and highly worrying trend.

It needs addressing.

Spot on. People forget just how good Joel was the season before last in the second row. He is NOT easily replaceable, he is one of the young English players that the Wigan and England squads need. To claim the only players that we need to worry about leaving are backs like Sam, Lomax and Foster is daft. Foster is awful anyway, if he couldn't kick he wouldn't play rugby league IMO, but that's besides the point.

Great post.

You are right the cap is not split evenly which is exactly why it makes no odds where they come from. There would be star players in the side be they English or not. As there are now. Who is our biggest star? Sam Tomkins. Will he be one of our highest paid players? Yes. I just do not get what you are suggesting. That we pay each player 1/25 of £1.6m or what? Sam and Joel on five year deal will be highly paid RL players. The fact we have some overseas players makes no difference to that.

If all clubs stopped spending money on overseas players and started to use the money giving decent contracts to young players, they might not start to look at joining union.

This makes no sense!

Do you honestly think that Sam or Joel signed a 5 year contract for a poor wage?

They'll be very well paid for their contracts, their agents are stupid enough to let them sign a 5 year deal on next to nothing.

All very laudable - but sentimental platitudes completely divorced from reality from start to finish I am afraid.

Whilst I agree, without players like pat Richards, Carmont, M Monas the league would be poorer. On top of that, even if clubs paid young English players more they still couldn't compete with wages offered by RU clubs.

To me it all boils down to the clubs spending, most clubs are the same over here. You can't expect to have new top overseas players (Hoffman, Finch, Lima) on big bucks. Top class club vets (Leuluai, SOL, Richards, Carmont, etc) on good money again, with an exciting crop of young players coming through in last couple of years where is the money going to appear from to pay them what they are worth??! IMO you need to lose some of the older players to upgrade for the future.

That's your opinion with which I simply do not agree.

Eastmond is a case in point, Dave. His departure was deemed by many as an absolute disaster for RL, at this point its a case of 'Kyle Who?' as Lomax and Gaskell have emerged in his stead.

Rugby League is ingrained into the fabric of towns like St Helens and Wigan. There will always be hundreds and thousands of lads who grow up desperate to play for their club, and there will always be someone else to step into the breach left when people move elsewhere.

People are talking as if an exodus of players would result in the death of the game. I've never heard such rubbish.

Who are now on the RU radar no doubt.

Of course it matters where they are from, do you not want a large pool of english players that are eligible for internationals? My point stands Wigan having 7 overseas players probably taking 40% of the overall salary cap is not healthy for the development of english talent and also keeping english talent in RL than RU. This debate is about more than Joel. Its the attitude towards squad building as a whole.

But Matty, even if they leave and are replaced by inferior players, my loyalty is to Saints and I will continue to go and support whoever wears the shirt. That's the point I'm making.

I've highlighted the bit that causes the entire problem in our sport.

We don't have 14 "Super rich owners"

We don't NEED 14 Super rich owners.

What we DO need is for any club with money to spend to be allowed to spend it, but whilst the likes of Castleford and Wakefield are given free rein to basically veto any increase in the cap (because they, personally, can't afford it), the game will continue to leak talent.

Yes - This will mean that Wigan & Warrington will have more to spend than the other clubs, but it's up to them to come up with their own ways to raise money in order to compete.

In the past 2 years, Wigan created the first club TV commercial within RL and both us and Wire are very active in marketing ourselves.

Just because the small clubs are unable to do this, their only chance is to hold the rest of us back.
Asking them to vote for a salary cap increase is like asking a turkey to vote for Christmas.

The cap needs to be reset to its original purpose - To stop clubs from bankrupting themselves by restricting them to spending no more than 50% of turnover.

Bear in mind that this didn't work properly - London Broncos.
But before anyone spouts garbage about the current system protecting clubs - Crusaders, anyone?

IMO the sport should NEVER allow the likes of Cas and Wakey to kill the rest of the sport, just to give themselves a fighting chance (even though they never have and most likely never will reach the GF).

The cap is failing, the sport is failing and all the while, the overpaid muppets at Red Hall are taking as much cash as they can out of the game, until something better/more lucrative comes along.

So if Wigan "built" their squads better with very little or no overseas players, Sam and Joel still wouldn't end up at Union?

The idea we can simply roll others off the production line and that tradition and history will save the game is simply pie in the sky. Unless you want to see a game of a much lower standard than we have now that is which possibnly goes back to being semi-pro. Just because Eastmond isn't actually as good as anyone thought does not mean they won't toss him aside and come back for Lomax or Sam Tomkins does it? Whether you want to acknowledge it or not the game can not sustain a regular trickle of players such as Eastmond and J Tomkins leaving. We have an incredably difficult time putting together an England team of anythkg like the quality required to compete with the Aussies and the loss of a player like Joel makes that even harder as he was a shoe in for selection. That should show you why we can't sustain the loss of even a handful of players. We have not got quality players coming out of our ears.

No but its not just about Joel and Sam (for the 4th time in this topic). If Wigan had 4 overseas signings instead of 7 we would have roughly around 250k-300k to spread about the squad in wages. Which in my mind i would spend on signing up our best talent to deals that become very expensive for RU to buy out and good enough to keep the young lads heads from being turned when they weigh up the prospects of moving to a union side.

This has all started by chairmen looking for instant sucess rather than developing players. Too many clubs have relied on Wigans cast offs filling up there squads and we have been bitten on the in trying to buy sucess when theres tons of Wigan cast offs with more medals than current and recent past Wigan players.

Hopefully by this time tomorrow everyone will know for definite what's going on. Who's in, who's out, and who the coach will be. Plus we'll hear Lenegan's view's on everything. It's gonna be a long 24 hours until then.

Couldnt agree with you more. The current rules and salary crap and RFL are in favour of clubs like Wakefield and Castleford. If clubs like Wigan, Warrington, Leeds, Hull FC and Saints we're given abit more of a free reign when it comes to spending then the game would be in a much much better state.

Ain't that the truth!

That said, these things happen and you have to entrust in the current management to make best use of what's available. With the changes to the Aussie cap and the general dearth of talent in SL, we might well be better off sitting on any compo we receive and promote from within rather than risk knee-jerk purchase of someone who could fail for a whole lot more money.

They might well both leave, who knows. But if Wigan had a better structured cap he would be on more money now, thats why he signed for 5 years so they could lump most of the money on the back end of the contract. As has been said you can't pay top dollar to everyone every year.

Never been so depressed about this game i love than i am today..it as just clicked that the best RL academies are now just RU production lines.