It’s a reference made tongue in cheek to the Kruz Leeming thread.

We should be celebrating the fact that the club are paying a good wage to a Wigan lad who has come through the system and shows a massive amount of promise for the future. And is already comfortably the best 9 at the club. Maybe the management see his future in another position...

£100k is hardly mega bucks for a professional sportsman. If we can afford it and it's manageable within the SC, who cares?

It is great if they are paying this amount for him. It just put the spotlight on the Salary Cap rules. He’s been developed by ourselves and now we’re being penalised by trying to keep hold of him and keep him in the comp. If they’re homegrown we should be able to exempt any amount over a certain amount. We’d have team put out by Leeds, Wigan and saints full of decent home grown players on good money. Money that would likely keep them out the hands of the NRL.

I'm pretty confident saying that O'Neill will be a future Wigan captain. Loads of potential in the lad.

The one problem i have this club is that there have been around 50 Wigan born players that in other super league clubs that could have been really players.

But you cannot keep everyone - it’s a sign of the quality of our academy.

There are always going to be players we keep who don’t work out and those who leave who go onto better things.

Agreed. You also can't legislate for those that look ordinary at an early age and then go on to be great players.

Even from a Saints point of view Whitley was in our Academy and Ashurst has gone on to forge himself a good SL career.

Welsby is probably the one that got away as it seems he was told he wasn't good enough. Maybe he wasn't that great as a junior as I've suggested above.

Hampshire looked a world beater in the academy but it didn’t work out whereas Williams absolutely hit the ground running.

From recent memory it’s only Halsall and Nicholson that may come back to bite us.

wasnt a passing comment, was having a beer with him like I do often and I asked, I remember when I posted what Micky Higham was on years ago and everyone jumped on me saying it wasnt true, gave us a laugh for a couple of weeks.....but anyway I'll let him know on Sunday hes a liar

Is it worrying we have got Leeming tied down for 4 years when it looks like O Neil is a capable super league player and can do 80 minutes?

They’ll work quite nicely as a pair I think. He’s developing really well is O’Neill but you don’t want to flog him for 80 minutes every week. He also played as much 13, as he did 9 in the academy, so I could see a scenario where him, Leeming and Smithies share minutes around (Smithies 13, Leeming 9 and O’Neill spelling between the 2). I’d have O’Neill as our starting hooker going in to 2024 though. I think he’s earning that.

was one of his best games tonight, played with his head up instead of just passing, hopefully we can carry on like that

I liked his appetite to get in to the battle with somebody like Vaughan as well. He pestered him all night and looked to get under his skin, resulting in a penalty for us when Vaughan was in possession.

Surely it's fair to say that Leeming is much more of a 'scooting' dummy-half than O'Neill (not that O'Neill never runs from dummy-half), so a point of difference between is what we want? It's what plenty of sides do, both in SL and the NRL.

Was going to comment this myself, fully agree.

I think they contrast eachother enough to compliment.