Harlequins have been in existence 30 years, and have 6 overseas players in their squad this year.

Catalans have been in existence 6 years, and have 6 overseas players in their squad this year.

Crusaders have been in existence 6 years, and have 12 overseas players in their squad this year.

We've been in existence over 100 years, and have 7 overseas players in the squad, and it would have been 9 if the Leo Latu deal hadn't fallen through and if Bailey hadn't retired.

The RFL need to wake up and stop letting us sign as many overseas players as we want. Why should we be allowed to bend the rules? It's a joke. It's a huge disadvantage for all the other clubs.

Play by the rules or get out the league!

Depending on how you judge this, Hull KR have 10, Wigan have 8, Hull FC have 7 and most others have six in one way or another.

I don't want to appear a smart a*se here but both Catalans and Harlequins have at least 8 (not 6) non French/British born players to my reckoning.

Who are the 8 Harlequins players you are taking exception with?

I'm not all I'm saying is Quins have 8 non british born players to my knowledge. Dorn, Bailey, Randall, Temata, Howell, Krasniqi, Kouparitsas and Bryan. I don't have a problem with it I was just correcting a previous poster who said they had 6. And before you go to the trouble of explaining that some don't count on the quota I know.

I'm not disagreeing with anything you say, but:

How many overseas players were in the seventeen last weekend, or the week end before? Answer: 5, and 4 the week before. When the calibre of the overseas players is that of Cashmere, Holdsworth and Patten, there's no arguement against including them in our seventeen. Nero, also, adds to the squad, but I'm not sure about Mark Henry anymore. I'm of the opinion he's ok going forward, but not the best defensively or particularly quick, and we really should be able to find a British player of the same quality.

On the other hand we did have Leo Latu and Bailey on the books, plus we've still got Feka and Anderson, but would the latter two break into the first team right now. I would hope not, and Godwin appears a much better player for us then Leo Latu, probably, would have been. Our recent team selection has been far better than the summer recruitment drive. There seems some confusion over who decides what we players, but we certainly appeared to have far too many 30 plus players coming into the squad.

Anway, my point was, the number of overseas players does need capping. Although, it shouldn't stop any SL club bringing in genuine quality Aus/NZ players. Young players are coming through in abundance, whether this is due to franchising or better coaching is debateable. It could be said part of McRae's failing as our head coach was his old school method of finding an experienced Aussie to plug the gap.

It's very easy to criticise some of the recent signings but have you considered how difficult it must be to attract certain players to the Willows at this present time. I'm sure the club are very ambitious in who they approach but that's the easy part. Let's be honest the club aren't going to make it public knowledge who and how many turned them down. We only got Luke Patten because of DJ!

Let's hope Salford will be a much more attractive proposition if we can gain some momentum in the new stadium.

I'm not too sure about that, we currently only have 4 of our 27 man squad who are 30 or over and those are Patten, Cashmere & Nero (3 you've mentioned for the right reasons) and the other is Anderson. 19 of the squad are English / Irish (i.e. home grown) compare that to Saints, Leeds, Wigan & Warrington and we fair much better for 30+ players.

The average age of our squad at this moment is time is 24.84. (and thats not including Marriott, Davidson and Holmes)

I'm nervous!

You just never know what the RFL are going to come up with, until we get the nod for another 3 years I'm always going to have my doubts!!

The problem is that 2 of the 8 which you have identified are UK developed juniors. The orginal poster said overseas players not born overseas. I would have thought that most contributors would take overseas to mean developed overseas like the guys we have and the 6 Quins RL have. Clearly they are not overseas players if they are UK citizens who started playing the game as juniors over here.

I was responding to an earlier poster who was whining on about Catalans, Harlequins and Crusaders being teams full of overseas players. It's received wisdom that the newer clubs are just packed full of Aussies, and the people bleating about it don't bother to check whether it's true or not. The truth is, we are no better than them, and in some cases, worse.