Thank you for taking the time to answer my question, but surely any player, like in football should have a medical at the club who intend to sign them.

Surely you can't be that thick?

I don't blame Burgess for honouring his contract, as that's the rational thing to do. Just saying that given the nature of the sport, it's equally logical for players to have a plan B at hand so there isn't such a cliff edge if/when their playing career ends.

Burgess has a fashion line with his brothers

I'm not sure where this notion that he's walking away from a marquee contract has come from?

If he leaves then it will be because he's reached a termination deal with the club. That deal will have been negotiated and will be one both parties are happy with.

It's been said a million times, but there's more to this than money. GB might lose a chunk of cash, but only he will know what price he puts on both his short term and long term health. For all we know he might be in daily pain and that to him means he'd be happy to end his playing career.

The one thing I don’t agree with is when people say he may walk away as he’s putting his day to day health at detriment by ‘playing on’. He isn’t doing that if he isn’t playing is he? So why walk away from a fortune you’re getting paid to have physio on your hip problem and do some light work in the gym, all based around helping the issue? If it’s no better than when he made that last comeback, they’re not going to play him and they won’t push him through a full pre season, so he’s getting paid for pretty much nothing.

If they’re to come to an agreement about a parting of the ways, we’re going to need Burgess himself to be really down about the situation of not being able to play or even train properly and not be of the opinion that he’s happy to simply get paid for driving to the training ground. If he is the latter I doubt there’s much we can do about it and I don’t blame him in the slightest.

I'm taking a different approach on it and i guess it's all about the individual and what they want.

Bring prodded and poked for the next 24 months with little to no game time can't be good. These treatments, like most physiotherapy, will probably be quite painful. He might be in daily pain with no real upside (especially if it's degenerative).

You hear plenty of stories about how difficult players find it when they get long term injuries - well this has to be the worst situation of all of these imo.

Yep, he's getting free access to top medical experts and physio whilst he's a Wigan player, and essentially being paid to deal with this injury. Once he stops being a Wigan player that becomes his burden to shoulder with his drastically reduced incomings. He'll also need to keep taking time off whatever job he gets for physio etc, and may struggle to do some manual jobs. It's not like he stops playing rugby and the pain, loss of mobility etc goes away.

Absolutely agree it must be tough for him but I just think him getting paid to take physio, to do light training and not play is surely preferential to walking away with less money than the full value of his contract, still have to deal with pain, still need physio, an operation etc but all on his own time and money.

Ultimately I think everyone hopes he does decide to retire but from his POV I’m sure he will hold out for the absolute maximum he is due. It may just be that to get that he stays around the club for the full length of his deal and whilst that won’t be good news for us, he’s entitled to do so.

Fingers crossed a good outcome is reached for all parties. One thing I’m convinced of is that his time as a top level player is over. We may get him to a level where he’s as good as say Tony Clubb (and that may take an operation and months out of the game) but there’s no chance it’s going beyond that.

Says he who chases eggs!

I still can't understand how he passed a medical in his condition, still baffling the guy can barely walk never mind run

yet he was MOM V Hudds there, or at least should have been

He had a half decent game but wasn’t dominant however, he did score a good try
I must admit coming home from that game I really thought he would kick on.
A fit Burgess would transform our pack.

he was excellent, tackled well also