phil lowe? knocker norton? your just making up names!!! whos this roger bloke you've named a stand after? what did he do, something to do with greyhounds or the speedway?

Sterling response Sheldon.

Can you actually count ?

Luckily I'm one of the few who grew up in East hull to actually get a decent education!....




















I went to school in west hull!

Did they not teach you place names start with capital letters...eg, Hull

i cant believe your having a spat about East Hull/ West Hull education..........there both absolute dogshiteeeeeeee!

Mulder wrote:In my opinion this is the best and most comprehensive explanation of the rule. http://www.wiganwarriorsfans.com/wigan/ ... c&o=584195 Hurrah! That's exactly how I thought the rules worked, except that I didn't know that the Federation Trained stuff only applied to the top 25 players at a club. I guess the confusion arises from the details of individual cases.

Mulder wrote:In my opinion this is the best and most comprehensive explanation of the rule. http://www.wiganwarriorsfans.com/wigan/ ... c&o=584195 Hurrah! That's exactly how I thought the rules worked, except that I didn't know that the Federation Trained stuff only applied to the top 25 players at a club. I guess the confusion arises from the details of individual cases.

It wasn't me who sent the email, but I had a copy of the reply. It didn't actually contradict anything from that link as it dealt with the detail of how those rules were applied to individual players.

Any player who would qualify to become Fed Trained due to being in the UK game prior to the rules coming in must apply during the final year of his contract. The change to Fed Trained then comes into force upon the termination of that contract - normally November. Once reclassified as Fed Trained he stays that way for the rest of his career, regardless of which team he plays for.

The confusion arises when contracts don't terminate in the normal way. For instance, it's not abundantly clear if granting a contract extension counts as termination of the original contract allowing an immediate application to become Fed Trained.

So apart from Dobson everybody is Fed-trained. So all we have to worry about is the 'old' quota, firstly.

Dobson, Webster, Newton, Galea are 4 of the 5 (Crossman would have been the 5th). Vella and Fisher are EU/Kolpak, so outside the old quota. Contract renewals was then perhaps a bit of a red herring - it'd have been very open to abuse anyway.

So we have up to one spot for someone who is quota and non-fed, which would bring the total to five. Assuming that if you are caught out by the quota rule, you count as non-fed even if you were here by 2008, that would leave one more spot for a Kolpak (6 non-fed for 2010). Maybe why we were linked with a couple of Tongans?
Theoretically, if Galea followed Vella in becoming Maltese, he'd be off quota and non-fed - like Lenegan says Carmont is doing in getting a Samoan passport. If Galea wants to extend his career in the UK, it'd be worth him thinking about.

Edit - I forgot about Fitzhenry. We had Galea, Fitzhenry, Dobson, Webster, Newton and Crossman at the back-end of 2008. That's 6, so one must have been non-quota. Fitzhenry left because of quota restrictions so it can't have been him. It may have been Crossman, so it wouldn't be relevant now. If it's one of Newton/Galea/Webster we may have 2+1 spots available?????????

Rumoured down here that Lima will announce after the GF he is going to teh Tigers. Shame as he is a very good prop.