Andy Farrell has scored more than that. Should we get him to dust off his boots as well?

For one Bowen doesnt kick conversions, secondly this is the NRL, its nothing like playing Warrington, Oldham and Paris SG every week of the mid 90s. But you wouldn't know how good the NRL competition is because you dont watch it.

I am sad to see Tomkins go as he is very good to watch and players of his talent are rare in this country. As a replacement, Bowen is still very good.

Good luck against Leeds on Friday night.

And chairmen who are seemingly content to do nothing about it.

IL's approach looks to be to end up a big fish in a small pond. He doesn't see losing Sam as bad for SL or Wigan (apparently according to an article in the Observer). Why not? Well in a nutshell he seems to think all the top players will eventually be in the NRL or playing RU so we can survive by replacing them from the production line.

This will be good enough despite any good ones we do produce being picked off by the NRL because when all the decent players currently left in the league have retired we will be best placed to remain at the top of what will be a mediocre competition due to our production line and re-signing veteran ex-Wigan, ex-NRL players after a retirement package.

Gone is the ambition to bring the best players to Wigan or so it seems.

Now you can say that is a pragmatic approach to the problems the game faces or a defeatist approach. I think its a defeatist approach and instead of IL voting against increases in the cap or asking why would he want to pay players more I'd rather see him say things like we can't do that now but are working to increase income to the sport so we can. He's not though and in fact seems dead set against it. Everything is rosy because he thinks we can be top of a pile of mediocrity. A semi-professional future for the game beckons in my opinion.

If Hansen went to Salford at the end of next season we wouldn't get anything as he's out of contract. He may well go. That would hardly be a disaster as we are not short of back rowers.

As far as I'm concerned Ian Lenagan has done the best deal he can for Wigan RL. The new reality is that 75% of players would go to Union or the NRL if they had a chance. So the players Union tells us.

IL is ring fencing Wigan's finances by signing our best players on long term contracts, not to stop them going as he has always known he can't but to ensure he has a legal right to compensation. He has exacted that to an astoundingly successful degree.
It is suggested that Wigan RL will get £700k for Sam, £100k for Mossop and £250k for Hock. That's over £1m for players , apart from Hock, who wanted to play in the NRL. OK so that will probably arrive over the years of the player's contract. That's still far bettter than Saints got for Graham and Eastmond and what we got for Ashton, which of course was sod all!

Some have asked as to where's the money going, well perhaps to pay off some of the club's debts. Can't find my copy of the 2011 accounts but in 2010 we had £ms of debts. 2012 Accounts aren't available yet, not to me anyway.

As to Lenegan pocketing the money himself, well as yet he hasn't paid himself anything as Chairman and Owner of the club. If he paid himself £100k then it would be less than half Nigel Wood is getting and there's no comparison as to the ability and business acumen of the two men. He has also invested heavily in facilities like Central Park, Orrell training Ground, South Wales and is improving the scouting system.

A lot of mention has been written on here as to how IL has handled the Sam business and what he has or has not said.
What is significant to me is that when he first bought the club and had a fans forum at the Deanery he said he aquired the club to win trophies.
Either at that meeting or a later one he also said that having a profitable club was an important part of securing Wigan RL's future. Well, he's acheived both those targets. Maybe his next is to have a debt free club.

I do think that all the critisism of Ian Lenagan is unfair.
He has brought a winning culture to the club, trophies every year right now.
The club is making a profit and heading towards being debt free if not there already. That lot is sporting utopia!

Sam is a fabulous player and the best we've seen for a very long time. We've also seen some other very good players leave.
All this is part and parcel. As for my attitude, it's brought about by my experiences of watching Wigan RL.
When I started following the club mid/late fifties Eric Ashton was the captain. He was the captain of Wigan, Lancashire, Great Britain and a World Cup winning captain. When Eric rertired around 1969/70 I thought the Wigan Rugby League world was about to end. Also with Billy going about the same time.
After that, well, players come and players go, Sam came through the academy and is going. Nothing though, but nothing compares to losing Eric and Billy within a year or so, absolutely nothing!

Lenagan is around my age, if not my age and will have seen the same games, players, finals, trophies as me. Maybe he and I have the same attitude, players come and players go, so do Club Chairmen.
As we all say and believe, no one person is bigger than the Wigan RL. No one!
Ian Lenegan is securing the future of Wigan RL more than any of us thought possible and far better than most of his predessors.
Well Done Mr Lenegan and Thanks.

A great post

The more we talk the game down , the more it will slide

If the rah rahs can talk up a e sport, then surely we should be talking up our truly wonderful sport

Come on folks, give it a go

Someone has spoken the TRUTH! How dare you do such a thing.

Btw don't expect the majority of the idiots frothing at the mouth to even acknowledge 90% of what you said. They either have a blinkered agenda or they are far too stupid to comprehend things outside of their little world/bubble.

Lenegan as you said has brought trophies, stability and financial security to Wigan. That's his job and he's been excellent at it.

It's quite bewildering how some people - at least from their posts in the last couple of days, and from some made previously - don't seem to consider these three aspects important. It really beggars belief as to what they want from their club.

And this post does ?

We were talking about whether or not abolishing the Salary Cap would save the game. It won’t if there isn’t enough money in the pot to pay for it.

Sulkily saying ‘Okay let’s sell our players instead’ … adds nothing whatever to the debate, because we’ll be selling more than our players if we finish up with a league consisting of Wigan, Salford, Warrington and Leeds. That’s the crisis the game is facing – the SL doesn’t have enough money to sustain itself as things are without throwing ourselves open to NRL-type salary demands.

Some people, it seems, still don't get it.

The SC is not the only thing wrong with the management of RL. There are so many things wrong with the way the sport is run that it's difficult to know where to start. The SC is however as good a place as any. THe SC reflects wider issues and problems in the game - lack of ambition, a failure to grasp what a real system of financial controls would look like, envy amongst some people in the RL world that some players might make significantly higher wages than they do, a desire on the part of club owners to reduce pay in real terms. The SC makes many of these problems worse.

The SC is a failure, it has failed to level the playing field significantly, it has failed to provide financial stability, it has seen increasing numbers of players leave the game. To those who say we cannot afford to pay more, the only answer is that we have to find ways of doing so or the SL will become a semi-pro league more like the French championship than what we think of as top flight RL. This is because the SC era has seen appalling financial performance to the extent that clubs cannot afford to pay much more than the SC (and some clubs can't afford even to spend the full SC). Inflation has eroded the real value of the SC by more than 30%. Inflation will continue to chip away at the real value of the SC until the game goes semi pro.

What we need is a rigorous system of financial planning and monitoring. The pro SC brigade still like to pretend that there are only two options, scrap the cap (or raise it to unaffordable levels) or the status quo, when there is obviously a third option - introducing a better system.

Also when people talk about the risks of not having the current cap in place they not only forget that we could have a better system, they also forget that the risks involved in not doing anything are massive.