Yeah

yeah i'm sure preperations for life after Zak have already begun with it looking like Sutcliffe being groomed for FB.Still, a good cover option for the three quarters although i'm not sure it would be in the clubs best interest to keep a guy around that didn't have the best attitude even when he was flavour of the month.

Expect to see Hardaker back for 2017. It appears no-one wants to splash out on such a risky investment. Maybe thats why we've not seen any signings made, leaving cap space for this eventuality.

Could we just not register Hardaker? I know Hull KR de-registered Mason so they could play Dobson but was that just to ensure they were within the overseas quota or did it also remove his value from the salary cap?

I think your first line should have read "deregister"
It's not as simple as that, if we deregister Hardaker he is still under contract to us so his salary must count against the cap. If we don't pay him then I think he would sue us for breach of contract unless we can concoct sufficient grounds to dismiss him.

I doubt there would be any need to concoct anything to be fair. Give Zak enough rope and he will always hang himself.

Yeah I did mean de-register. I wasn't sure if we could pay him and honour the contract whilst de-registering him from our playing squad so that he didn't count against the cap.

But that would end any possibility of getting a fee for him, however remote that may be.

or clubs are still trying to offload others to get the cash for hardaker

Leeds have no bargaining power. It's already clear Hardaker isn't wanted and won't play again for us. He is not wanted because he's a pain in the @r$e with low impulse control. He was playing badly when Leeds shipped him off to Australia and this is the last reference point anyone has to evaluate him on. Other clubs will also be aware that he is probably earning reasonably well at Leeds and taking up a valuable chunk of cap (which is small to begin with).
Given all of this I would not be the least bit surprised if Leeds ended up offering another club cash to take him off our hands.

I don't think it would be such a bad thing, it really depends or not if he can get his head down or not.

It would leave us with Sutcliffe and McGuire in the halves, which is something many have written off, but remember that they never really got a chance to play together this year because of injuries, and showed themselves a good pair in 2015.

The big looser (providing we weren't going to sigh a halve anyway) would be Lilly, but I dot think he is ready to be a regular starter anyway, so he will probably spend a year playing mainly for Fev

This would be best case scenario for everyone involved. Especially Lilley, I think Halves need to play every week and have a real chance to take control, not just play week in week out. I'm not sure he'll get that at Leeds.

Update in tomorrow's YEP on Hardaker and squad numbers announced next week. Should have a clearer picture of what we're going with next season within the next 4/5 days.

Indeed.

With a signing announced I would guess (Wood)

Hardaker has been at an official Cas event this evening.