***** ALL FANS FORUM TALK HERE *****

Quote: Bert's Medal "I was very impressed with IL last night.

My impression last season was that he was personally trying to do everything at the club & didn't have the support in place - he now has the likes of Mick Hogan, Simon Collinson etc as part of his management team and I believe that the club is in very good hands going forward.

Some highlights from last night (apologies if some have already been covered) were:

- We are currently looking at a £150k loss for the season, although a Wembley appearance is worth £250k, so we could be looking at a £100k profit,

- Lenagan's (& the RFL's) clear priority going forward is developing high quality young players,

- At present, we have signed no new players for next season. Wigan had looked at around 6 props and various other overseas players - £150k a year ago equated to around Aus$400k, it is now worth Aus$295k. Because RL is so popular in Australia, many of the top aussie players have lucrative media and promotional contracts, which they cannot get in the UK, therefore, making it more difficult to attract them. Lenagan did due dilligence on a number of players and decided that there were negative issues attached that meant that they were not worth the outlay or risk. Certain other club's lack of due dilligence may have interesting results. IL did state the obvious, that with Feka and Fielden off-contract at the end of the 2010 season, there could be a huge wedge of SC money available to sign props (IF Feka and Fielden were not re-signed),

- Before Mick Hogan came to Wigan, the club did not have a Foundation scheme (linked to work in the community etc). We now have - Warrington have 24 fulltime staff attached to theirs and it is worth £1m per year to their club! Part of the community work involves links to an Educational Academy, where Wigan are looking to have a RL Centre of Excellence at which the U18s and U20s will train etc.

- Sponsorship - Wigan have signed up 5 new sponsors in the past 12 months......Mecca Bingo, UCLAN, Warburtons, Ashton, Wigan & Leigh PCT plus 1 other. We are at an advanced stage in negotiating for the major shirt sponsor for next season, with Mecca being one of the companies that we are negotiating with. Not having this sponsorship in place pre-Christmas (& the lack of the JJB Sports pipeline) seriously affected our ability to shift shirts, with around 8k being sold this season compared to the expected 16k - although a Wembley appearance this season will help to address this! Since Wigan signed up Mecca, around 50% of SL clubs have also contacted them about sponsorship,

- Scouting - I won't repeat the Chorley Panthers scenario that was very well put as a question to IL (I know that it is covered earlier in this thread). IL agreed that scouting needed to be improved, but that over the past 12 months it had not been a priority owing to everything else at the club,

- Quins - IL still owns 65% of the shares at Quins, but has no active interest whatsoever in the club, although a soft spot for them. He is trying to sell the shares,

- Individual players - IL would not comment on individual players (questions were asked about Pryce, Fielden etc) other than to say that he believed that, with recovery and conditioning, Pryce could turn out to be a world class player and that he hopes that Fielden will perform well over the remainder of this season and next),

- Fanbase - No decision has yet been made on season ticket prices for next season (Hudds slashed the price of season tickets by 50%, but this only resulted in a 3% increase in attendances!). Mick Hogan outlined that Wigan intend to target youngsters ("the next generation of life-long Wigan fans"icon_wink.gif. He quoted an interesting statistic that I won't quote on here to avoid trolling (if you are a Wigan fan, PM me if you want to know!),

- Partnership with an Aussie NRL club - Wigan expect this to happen in the next 12 months & are trying to attach Mark Flannagan to a club for the next 12 to 24 months, hoping that he will then return to Wigan. The idea is to loan young players between the clubs as part of their development, with Wigan's young players being able to play Toyota Cup or even NRL - I had to laugh at the guy sat behind me who shouted "tell them to loan us Lockyer"
Cheers for that.

Cant believe people are complaining about IL doing due dilligence on players. Just because he goes over to Aus to look for players, doesnt mean he has to sign someone. Vialiki any one?

Do we really want to sign players on the back of promotional videos and agent talk, surley people remember Doc Murray!

With regards, the players, I personnally dont have a problem with calling bad performances/play, but to single out people and have a go, is not on.

Whilst I dont think Karl Pryce is as good as some do, I certainly didnt think it was a good thing when he went down injured. Did i question his attitude, yes of course i did, but we all want (or i hope we do) the same thing, and that is a successfull wigan side.

Lets try something novel, next time a poster goes a bit overboard on the personall front, someone have a quiet word. Is this in the remit of the moderators? By no means stop people critiquing play, but some of the things said about certain non wigan born players is beyond the pale