As you all know on here I have been advocating some form of dispensation/ reward for academy products for years now.

In Australia I believe that are looking at a points system, which will reward clubs for producing LOCAL players. Players brought in or bought in will incur a premium.

I'M sure Father Ted who posts on here will explain it far better than I can.

Sounds like a plan.

If it's happening in Australia, it will soon probably happen here.

But one thing is for certain - doing nothing at all, which is the RFL's current favoured position, is not an option.

I was under the impression that image rights are also covered by the cap.

If so, why? I'd have thought this would be a great way to increase the players salary whilst raising the profile of RL in the media.

IL is a very astute businessman and seems to understand a lot of the requirements of an RL club having been at Quins and Now Wigan.

Do you think he would make a very good replacement for Richard Lewis ?

The problem with image rights is it's open to abuse. What would have stopped Whelan making Darren Lockyer, Andrew Johns, Gordan Tallis and Shane Webke the faces of JJB and giving them an extra £200K a year?

IL spoke again about the SC at last night's pre season dinner.

He repeated what is in the League Express and the need for clubs to spend within the SC. He is emphatic that the SC should not be increased.
It is obvious that IL has done a fantastic job since he bought the club. He said that if nothing untoward happened this year the club will make a profit. That is in just over three years and from the financial state things were in when DW sold the place.
To have silverware in the cabinet and make a profit is rare in sport and IL has acheived it in not a very long time.
He said the club was well run and had very good management. That is most certainly true.

As for the SC, I was against when it was first proposed and prior to its introduction. It was against a background of some clubs spending as much as 90% of their turnover on players wages. It was thought that by restricting those players wages clubs would stop going broke.
I never believed the SC alone would stop clubs going broke and it hasn't. Back then that was the primary purpose of the SC and nothing else.
Wellens comments about a better distribution of talent are nonsense. His club has brought in the best forward from Quins and the best player from Castleford. HullFC have bought the best forward from Cas and a talented young winger from Quins.
Quins and Cas are weaker from these transactions, Saints and HullFC are stronger. The gap between bottom and top has widened not narrowed.

There are so many various costs involved in running a club that although salaries are a major part of expenditure, it is the whole cost base that has to be brought under control. Not just the salaries of the highest paid 25 players. The SC has been complied with broadly this last few years yet club after club has gone into admin. Someone told me that this is the third time Wakefield have gone into Admin in the last five years. In those five years I'm sure they haven't breached the SC.
I have always hoped that the RFL/SL will bring a structure in that ensures clubs are controlling all costs and that their overall expenditure doesn't exceed turnover. Perhaps we need a "Costs Cap" rather than just a Salary Cap.

As has been mentioned the Aussie press have been saying the NRL are to dump the SC and are trialing a points system. What I do fear is that when they do introduce a new system to replace the cap the RFL/SL knee jerk and simply replicate it and we end up with an Aussie system and not one that suits British Rugby League.

There is no doubt that Ian Lenagan has done a superb job since he first bought the club.
Management is about making things happen.
IL has certainly made a lot of very good things happen at Wigan.

Beat me to it! I agree with every word you just said as I did with IL last night. The only way the salary cap could increase is if the revenue increased. I would love nothing more than for our sport to be on a massaive scale bringing in millions and millions and our players get the rewards for that. Unfortunatley as a minority sport in this country we just can't.

And still no solution offered as to how we keep our best players in the game.

I've supported Ian Lenagan through thick and thin since he arrived - I've been accused of being everything from a 'happy clapper' to his wife. But I disagree with him on this, or at least on parts of it.

Keep the Salary Cap by all means. But we need something to encourage our best young players to stay in the game. I'm sure Ian wouldn't have a problem with that.

I don't believe anybody is arguing with that. However, the points remains and has been a key part of my own argument around the salary cap that we need to grow the revenue into the game to pay out better salaries. That has never changed. How do we do that? I side with the increased level of competition argument i.e. an increasingly tighter and more competitive competition should increase interest, attendance and viewing figures. I know some argue that by having a more attractive game with 'superstar' line-ups will do the same. We can argue forever on which will work but given the lack of financial resources around the game the most cost effective option with least risk is the former and the risk is too great a burden on the game (as IL is effectively saying) for us to be attempting to grow the sport and its revenues that way.

A "Costs cap" would be a good idea, although should Clubs really need to be told to not spend more money than they earn? I suppose the problem of a "Costs cap" would be that it would put the likes of Leeds and Wigan miles ahead of Quins etc. You could argue that if they can't get the money in then that's their own problem but the gap between the top teams and the likes of Quins etc would be even greater than it is now. I do think there should be something to encourage teams to bring through their own talent. Perhaps the Salary Cap should only be applicable to players that haven't come through your academy. That way we'd have fewer imports and the richer clubs wouldn't be able to poach the better young British players from the "lesser" teams.

There's no real argument from me with the jist of this. But a key issue with Kyle Eastmond, for example, is not that Saints (or Warrington, or Wigan, or Leeds) can't afford to pay him a little bit extra to stay in the game. It's that they're not allowed to. I bet Eamon McManus wishes right now that he had just a little more leeway with which to negotiate for Eastmond.

It's too easy to say the Salary Cap must remain because there aren't the resources generally to raise it. That doesn't take into account the top tier of clubs, who probably could afford a little bit extra to try to entice their stars to stay (and at the end of the day, we need some stars - we can't keep churning them out for the benefit of Rugby Union). I'm not talking about IL's semi-mythical £500K or whatever he was supposed to have said. If players are asking that kind of silly money, they can indeed sod off. But most of them, I suspect, aren't.

That's too simplistic a view. If the cap was raised, it wouldn't be set aside to give to the likes of Kyle Eastmond. It would be spent across existing players in existing squads as agents queued up for a slice of the bigger pie.

There's nothing wrong with that, but the likelihood is that even if the cap was £150k higher, it would still have been spent (across the squad or on another player) and Saints still wouldn't have enough cap to re-sign Kyle. And the clubs would be sailing £150k closer to the wind.

It may also be that it doesn't matter how big the cap was, Kyle would want to play in the bigger sport (let's not be naive here) of Union.

Where are the clubs going to generate this extra revenue from ?

Wigan situation has been nothing short of a miracle off the back of some very hard work by IL to put in place good management team to turn around the club but when you look at other clubs who seem just to be doing enough to exist what can they do or have done to them say by the RFL to sanction them if they fall short of there own business plan in respect to revenue generated.

The only way to generate more revenue was to take the game out of the heartlands into untapped sources , but as it stands Both London and Wales have had nothing but problems financially and also the roots are not stable financially and Wakefield going under is a prime example of this.

So where do we turn now to generate the extra revenue?

On Eastmond has he said he wants to leave Saints or is this posturing by his agent ?

To be honest Kyle has been injured for considerable amounts of the season and has a lot to prove, so his negotiating stand point is somewhat weak also does he not have any faith in what Saints are doing unlike Sam Tomkins who does not want to go anywhere else because of the set up at Wigan ?

Even though from childhood he was a keen RL fan, and signed for an RL club as his first choice?

My view may be a tad simplistic, but that view is more than a tad defeatist and is trotted out far too often as if there's no alternative argument.

In the days when we paid more money than Union, the flow of players came our way. The 'much bigger 15-a-side game' didn't seem quite so attractive then. Let's not totally kid ourselves into believing that the future, all round, is much rosier in Rugby Union. Money is the main thing.