Doncaster chief slams Wigan owner Lenagan

Doncaster chief executive Carl Hall has slammed Wigan owner Ian Lenagan in a strongly worded statement following the cancellation of Wednesday’s RFL EGM.

Hall’s statement is printed in full below:

Who the hell does Ian Lenagan think he is?

Like all of us, he has known about this for 12 months. The RFL has been consulting with the clubs at meetings after meetings, and we’re all fully aware of what’s been going on.

Then at the eleventh hour before the council meeting, Mr. Lenagan goes and puts things in the paper as if he knows nothing.  He’s supposed to be a businessman – has he been going to these meetings, or has he been sending people from the club who haven’t informed him?

Ian Lenagan is the chairman and owner at Wigan, a very successful club that is winning trophies. If he wants to run the Rugby League, then he should leave Wigan and try and do that.

When he was at Harlequins nobody knew who he was, and he wasn’t shouting his mouth off then. For him to have that meeting called off at the last hour and say that he hasn’t been informed about anything is nonsense. We were all ready to go to the council meeting.

I own my club as well, and now we have no idea what’s going to happen next year. We have been recruiting players to play at a certain level, and who is he to interfere with that? I thought Rugby League people were family people, with morals.

But here we have somebody who wants to have secret meetings with clubs, cherry picking the ones he can control. He has his own club to control – he shouldn’t be trying to run the whole game.

Waiting until after the World Cup is too late.

I fully support the RFL, but what I’m not happy about is why we have to cancel a big meeting on the back of one individual’s comments.

For me personally, we should have gone to the meeting, aired our views in-house without going to the press. I have never been to the press like this before, but I felt that I had to with this.

The policy and procedure of the RFL has always been to go to meetings and deal with things in-house, and I think he has disrespected the game by doing this publicly.