Can I ask one crucial question ? Who's his agent ?



Hope its not the same as Chris Ashton.....

He will more than likely be earning that kind of money at Wigan in 2-3 years time anyway and has the [ipotential[/i to retire a club legend in the distant future.



Would be foolish to go to rah rah

Load of sh*t. They may have offered but he wont go.

Would we not require a fee because his contract runs till 2010?



We need to keep him at all costs. Get rid of Cameron Phelps & Tim Smith just don't let that lad go.

It's a load of rubbish the Northampton rumour. But I do know 2 super league sides are intrested in him.

If thats true id tell them where to go even if they offered a couple of hundred K!!!



They might be able to tempt sam but as we hold his contract we should take a zero tolerance policy on any union approaches and tell them to F off at all costs!!

I can imagine most super league sides would be interested in him.

I really, really hope there is nothing to this.



If we can't pay enought to keep players like Tomkins in RL at least for the initial part of their career - I accept in the long run the lure of RU cash and international prospects to a star player will be very difficult to counter but we should be able to pay real prospects a decent wage to make the RU switch too much of a risk for them to take at a young age and ensure that we can at least watch our star backs for the first few years of their "rugby" careers - then there is no point in professional RL anymore and we all might as well give up watching it. The declining standards in SL are bad enough without our young talent getting snapped up by RU.

Exactly it would be different from the situation with Chris Ashton as he is still contracted at Wigan & so would require a fee.



I would extend his contract beyond 2010 this season and offer his current wages + whatever Cameron Phelps is on.



We can't let any of our promising young stars contracts run out till the last year we need to have them contracted constantly and extend there contract while they're still under contract. This should then help stop Union poaching our youngsters, they may still sign but it will be our choice not theirs.

One's made an offer to take him on loan.

cough cough... chris ashton (wasn't he offered 140k??)

EXACTLY......the RFL dont know what they're doing....some other idiot from the RFL was champagning the idea of the communist cap tonight on GMR and how great the game now is as 9 Teams are now spending full cap!! ERR... reality check mate....if 9 teams where spending 3m or so then maybe....but all we have done is hold back or top teams and stagnated the game to wakefield and castlefords level were you can still afford to spend full cap even only pulling gates of 6k!!!



The danger is that the 'saviour' as it is talked about (CC) of rugby league IMO is what dangers RL existance and progression the most at the moment, when you have an RU cap of 4 mil and silly money in french RU which means that we'll end up in the same position we're in now media wise, yet we'll probably not even have the better product as an arrow in our bow in 5-10 years because as you say all the decent young tallent wil have buggered off and we'll be left with second rate no marks playing our game (just look at the current England side for a perfect example....our weakest international team in 40 years IMO)