Wigan Want Farrell to Stay for One Final Fling

Wigan hope that Andy Farrell will still be able to give them one last season even if his mooted move to rugby union goes through.

Wigan and the Rugby Football Union confirmed yesterday that they are negotiating over the 29-year-old Great Britain captain's switch of codes before the 2007 World Cup. Farrell is understood to want an end to the speculation either way as soon as possible, but the RFU may need more time to find a club to share the cost of an annual salary in excess of £200,000, which may also involve granting an exemption from the Zurich Premiership's salary cap.

Wigan will not stand in the way of a player who has given them outstanding service for more than a decade, even though he has 18 months remaining on his contract.

However his immediate departure would leave a gaping hole in their squad for the 2005 Super League campaign, so they will be desperate for him to make himself available when he recovers from the knee surgery that is expected to keep him out until mid-April.

That would give Wigan's chairman Maurice Lindsay some time to find a replacement, and as Farrell is easily Wigan's highest-paid player on a £1m six-year contract he signed in 1999, his departure would ease the salary-cap pressures that have restricted Lindsay's ability to spend the money of the owner Dave Whelan in recent seasons.

That could even set up a bid for Sonny Bill Williams, the teenage New Zealander who has taken the game by storm in the past year to rival Farrell as the world's best loose forward and whose contract with the Canterbury Bulldogs ends at the end of the season.

Four years ago the Rugby Football League established a fighting fund to top up the salaries of targeted players and managed to keep Wigan's full-back Kris Radlinski and the St Helens hooker Keiron Cunningham in the 13-man code. But an RFL spokesman confirmed last night that the fund no longer exists.