Quote: Wigan/Leeds Andy "I have family links with Pats at committee level so I may be accused of impartiality, however it also means I know how the club operates a lot more than most on here. I've lost count of the number of times the club have been accused of all manner of things from disgruntled people of other clubs, none of which have ever been proved, probably because they didn't happen, or were spun so much which is what happens with these rumours.
You've said yourself there's no proof, lets face it if there was it would be relatively easy to get. I'm sorry but until there is, it just goes down as yet another episode of bollox we've heard before, and I've heard a lot of them.'"
Now I understand why you're taking this stand, and I respect that - it's loyalty to the club you're affiliated with. But I promise you I'm not trying to sully the name of St Pats (hopefully you'll know from my previous posts that I'm not that petty). I'm not interested in disgruntled people in the past. I can't comment on any of that because I had no involvement with any former incidents. But I'm not making things up re. this latest scandal.
How do you go about gettng proof when there are kids involved? As I say, you can hardly video them training at Pats or IRB when they should be training with the clubs they're registered to, or secretly tape-record conversations with them. There's no documentation detailing these secret deals that you can requisition and produce as evidence.
How on Earth do you prove it, let alone prove it 'relatively easily'?
In actual fact, written and verbal statements were presented to NWC from people who were prepared to go on record about things they'd seen, been told or had overheard. Some of the parents of the kids who were leaving openly admitted that they'd been told their sons had a much better chance of 'being noticed' at either Pats or IRB. At least one coach from the Wigan and Leigh SA was named in this. None of this would be sufficient to gain a conviction in a court of law, but it was sufficient to worry NWC, who held at least two emergency meetings at Golborne ARLFC during June and July, in order to discuss the crisis. People named were summoned to explain themselves, but not surprisingly produced a blanket denial. This was apparently so unconvincing that it wasn't believed, and some of them supposedly received warnings.
I'm not going to keep chunnering on about this because it's boring for those who aren't affected, plus it's semi-final day and we'll soon have bigger fish to fry. But here's a last thought. I understand why you take the St Pats side. It's fair enough. You don't want to hear bad stuff about them, because there's been loads of that in past and it's nearly always been bollox. But take Shevington Sharks as an example. For several years their team had been holding their own at the very top of junior rugby in NWC - at the same time St Pats were in a lower division. Then, at the end of last season, just as the story was breaking about the St Jude's Scholarship players announcing they wanted to to to IRB and the first allegations were being made that soneone in the Wigan youth development programme was behind it, three of Shevington's four Scholarship players suddenly announced that they all wanted to leave to go to newly promoted St Pats - when they'd shown no interest in that before (and could offer no real explanation for it). For the record, the other Scholarship player suddenly decided that he wanted to go to IRB!!!
There's perhaps a one in fifty chance that this is smoke without fire, but you can hardly blame people for thinking that it isn't.
Either way, it's destroyed the best junior competition Wigan had had for years and years.
