Sad loss for our game. Our league will soon be full of talentless players such as Ryan Bailey.

Lomax, Sam Tomkins, Tom Briscoe etc.... Will all be targeted in my opinion.

How old do you think Joel is? He IS a young player.



The transfer fee is useless. There is no one to buy and no one is selling.



JT is an England Internationals and forms a back row at Wigan with HH and Lockers that is one of the best in the league. With Hoffman gone JT it was the obvious move to put him back in the pack where he is not merely good but an outstanding player - much better than he is a centre. The idea he can easily be replaced is simply not true.

Precisely.

This isn't an isolated incident, and it needs to be looked at and evaluated as a growing and highly worrying trend.

It needs addressing.

Spot on. People forget just how good Joel was the season before last in the second row. He is NOT easily replaceable, he is one of the young English players that the Wigan and England squads need. To claim the only players that we need to worry about leaving are backs like Sam, Lomax and Foster is daft. Foster is awful anyway, if he couldn't kick he wouldn't play rugby league IMO, but that's besides the point.

Great post.

You are right the cap is not split evenly which is exactly why it makes no odds where they come from. There would be star players in the side be they English or not. As there are now. Who is our biggest star? Sam Tomkins. Will he be one of our highest paid players? Yes. I just do not get what you are suggesting. That we pay each player 1/25 of £1.6m or what? Sam and Joel on five year deal will be highly paid RL players. The fact we have some overseas players makes no difference to that.

If all clubs stopped spending money on overseas players and started to use the money giving decent contracts to young players, they might not start to look at joining union.

This makes no sense!

Do you honestly think that Sam or Joel signed a 5 year contract for a poor wage?

They'll be very well paid for their contracts, their agents are stupid enough to let them sign a 5 year deal on next to nothing.

All very laudable - but sentimental platitudes completely divorced from reality from start to finish I am afraid.

Whilst I agree, without players like pat Richards, Carmont, M Monas the league would be poorer. On top of that, even if clubs paid young English players more they still couldn't compete with wages offered by RU clubs.

To me it all boils down to the clubs spending, most clubs are the same over here. You can't expect to have new top overseas players (Hoffman, Finch, Lima) on big bucks. Top class club vets (Leuluai, SOL, Richards, Carmont, etc) on good money again, with an exciting crop of young players coming through in last couple of years where is the money going to appear from to pay them what they are worth??! IMO you need to lose some of the older players to upgrade for the future.

That's your opinion with which I simply do not agree.

Eastmond is a case in point, Dave. His departure was deemed by many as an absolute disaster for RL, at this point its a case of 'Kyle Who?' as Lomax and Gaskell have emerged in his stead.

Rugby League is ingrained into the fabric of towns like St Helens and Wigan. There will always be hundreds and thousands of lads who grow up desperate to play for their club, and there will always be someone else to step into the breach left when people move elsewhere.

People are talking as if an exodus of players would result in the death of the game. I've never heard such rubbish.

Who are now on the RU radar no doubt.

Of course it matters where they are from, do you not want a large pool of english players that are eligible for internationals? My point stands Wigan having 7 overseas players probably taking 40% of the overall salary cap is not healthy for the development of english talent and also keeping english talent in RL than RU. This debate is about more than Joel. Its the attitude towards squad building as a whole.