presumably they will play him in the centres in union? If so, you'd think there are better options available for that position.

Having said that NZ play SBW on the wing - league players going across are pretty limited in what positions they can play in general due to the "technical nature" of the game, so i guess they have one of the centre positions in mind for him - probably inside centre a bit like Tindall, big but not particularly fast or skillful.

And it doesn't happen to Gaskell, Lomax, Briscoe, Charnley, Jones-Bishop or any number of other talented young lads that are capable of making opposition teams looks daft.



I think this particular phenomenon has more to do with the personal qualities of the player in question than the fans.

Edited, quite reasonably I think.

There will be a big reaction saying the Salary Cap should be raised but the question I ask is why?



Wigan could pay them the same that they are being offered and release some of their other players to go to other Super League clubs. This would actually make the competition stronger because it would spread the talent around different Super League clubs thus evening up the competition and doing what the Salary Cap was intended to do.

So its Wigan responsibility to provide players for all of SL.

No, it's wigans responsibility to stick to the salary cap, the same one everybody else has, and to keep a competitive side.

If they have too many players earning too much money they have to sell them or pay them less, if someone else then chooses to pay them more than Wigan can, that's business.

Very difficult for any sane or rational person to argue with any of that; that won't stop plenty of Wigan fans mind you, who will be calling for exemption from the cap for the whole Tomkins family.

The rumour around Wigan are that he has been offered around 400K a season. Am sure NO team in Super League could afford to pay him that much.

They could pay him that but as I said they would then have spend the rest of the cap wisely. We managed to put a squad together on less than 1 million last year so we would have had plenty of room to offer him 400k if we had wanted to.

I very much doubt he is on that much a season. I'm sure Eastmond is on less than half that. One attraction about Union is that even if your initial contract isn't that much (in Union terms) you have the potential to earn a lot more with future contracts. Of course all that depends on how you adapt to the game. The time has come to accept that we are down the food chain regarding finances compared to Union. League players are seen as cheap gambles by Union clubs, everyone’s looking for the next Jason Robinson. This in part is due to the salary cap that is imposed on the Premiership teams. A lot of Premiership clubs just can't compete with the money rich French teams so they have to start looking outside of the game for next best thing. I expect the raid on league talent to continue for the near future, not that we can complain, we did our fair share of raiding Union in the past.