Warrington Wolves have been granted salary cap dispensation by the Rugby Football League following Kevin Brown’s season-ending injury.
After Wolves vice-captain Brown snapped his Achilles in training on the eve of the new season, Warrington followed Super League rival Castleford’s lead in applying for dispensation to take Brown off their salary cap – just as the Tigers did with scrum-half Luke Gale.
However, like Castleford, League Express understands Warrington have no immediate plans to use the dispensation at the present time. Chief executive Karl Fitzpatrick confirmed to League Express: “I can confirm we’ve been granted the salary cap dispensation in light of Kevin Brown’s unfortunate injury.”
On the field, Warrington made it two wins from their opening two games of the 2019 Super League season with a 28-14 victory over Hull Kingston Rovers.
However, they may face a nervous wait in the coming days to see if star half-back Blake Austin receives any further punishment from the Rugby Football League for the challenge which left Rovers captain Joel Tomkins with a severe concussion.
Wolves coach Steve Price, however, insisted he didn’t see much wrong with the incident on first glance.
“I thought the Blake incident was just being aggressive,” he said.
“I couldn’t see anything wrong with it from where I was sitting, to be honest. I’ll have to review it again.
“What does give me confidence is that we’ve played with 12 men for 30 minutes over the past two weeks and have kept two teams to scoring just 20 points.”
Wolves forward Lama Tasi’s debut was ended prematurely due to injury, and Price said: “Lama has a pretty severe cut. He’s getting stitched up at the moment, I think he’s having around 16 or 18 in his shin.
“It was a bit of a weird one. I’m not quite sure how it actually happened but other than that we’ve come through unscathed.”