More likely Austin to Hull to replace Reynolds then Williams to wire

The Wire defeat today could work against us. The rugby league live lads made a good point about how difficult it would be for Wire to get Austin to leave the club with a chance of a Wembley cup final on the horizon but it could be easier now, especially if a big club like Leeds offered him a decent deal for a few seasons.

I think we're all guilty of looking at this too deeply.

This looks like it will all come down to money and that, imo, paints GW in a bad light. Let's not forget that Wigan signed a deal, knowing he'd be NRL bound with 12 months left to go. Yeah it worked out for both parties, but Wigan did him a solid there.

Potentially signing with Wire is a FU to Wigan imo.

It could be another Shaun Edwards situation

I don’t begrudge any player getting as much money as he can from the game. These aren’t footballers and a gap in our deal to Wires of say 30/40k is huge and he’d be daft not to take it. I’d like to think if there wasn’t as much as that in the offers that he would come to us but ultimately the only way I’d be disappointed in the lad himself is if both clubs put the same deal on the table and he still went to Wire. Even then he could have his reasons for doing so. We joke about it always being Wires year but with Powell in charge they’ll go well over these next few seasons IMO and he might think his chances of success is better with them then with us.

Each to their own I guess, but imo, If someone is good to you and does you a favour, you don't throw it back in their face later.

We seem, as a sport, obsessed with telling lads to make as much money as they can. What ever happend to establishing a legacy at a club? I'd rather be a Radders and stick with a team that either stood by me or gave me a shot, than someone who chased the £.

I get your POV but I just don’t think lads can afford to work like that anymore. In football it really gets on my nerves when you see a lad and on 250k a week pushing for more money or choosing a transfer based solely on who will pay the most but these lads are on anything from 20k a year, up to the big earners like Williams who I guess will be looking at around 300k a year. In relative terms 30/40k is huge and would be tough to turn down when your career is so short.

I’ll also go back to the point that it may not just be about money for him. He genuinely may believe Wire are better placed to win things. He may also think Powell and his tactics can get the best out of him.

Who knows. I hope he does have that place in his heart for Wigan to walk away from more money at Wire. I don’t think Wigan should go OTT on an offer for him tbh. He’s a very good player but you could get comparable quality for less. Somebody like Sezer would be a very good pick up but the things Williams brings that somebody like Sezer doesn’t is that he’d be here for longer and he’d not take up as much cap space (even though he’d cost more).

I think there's a fine line between being smart and greedy.

If I was IL (easy to say when it isn't my money btw) I'd be making GW a competitive offer.

The money on the table might be less than Wire, but I'd also be reminding GW on how we got to this situation. We got there because the Wigan club gave him the opportunity. We picked him over another great prospect in Hampshire and gave him the platform. We also let him chase his NRL dreams too. The club have been good to him and now we again want to welcome him back and build a team around him and Smith. It's time to give a little back & you know what, Radders, SOL and Tommy are proof that we'll see you right after your career is over too.

They’ll weigh up the benefits I’m sure when it comes to deciding how high they’ll go. Him costing just 75k on the cap is huge ‘if’ we have they money to get up to what it will take. Having a quality halfback for at least 4-5 years is also massive, especially for me when I’ve been bemoaning the fact that the squad is constantly see players come and go and feels messy and complicated even further by the extended pre season breaks the two overseas lads got.

On the other side of it they’ll have to consider they don’t over pay to a ridiculous degree for a lad that is a very good player but not that good that you write blank cheques. They also need to make sure they don’t spend that much on him that we don’t get the couple of powerful forwards we desperately need. To sign Williams and blow the budget on him, to then play him on the back of what we have would be pointless. I’d rather Sezer and a couple of powerful forwards than getting Williams and Nathan Mason.

The "we" in that context is largely Shaun Wane, though, surely?

No. Wane picked him over Hampshire, IL signed the deal with the NRL break clause. There's others too...

Wane obviously had a big part to play, but to discount the other people at the club who have got him to where he is is wrong. The junior coaches that helped him develop, the s&c coaches who got him in shape etc. The "club" set him up. He took all that and did well, but as the saying goes - don't forget who helped you on you way up.