WARRINGTON Wolves chief executive Karl Fitzpatrick has revealed that a Super League rival made a play for George Williams.
It was in and amongst a deal that would have seen Huddersfield Giants centre Jake Wardle sign for Warrington after spending the last half of the 2022 Super League season on loan at the Halliwell Jones Stadium.
But, now Fitzpatrick has stated that ‘ridiculous demands’ from Huddersfield stopped any deal from happening, particularly with who the Giants wanted in return.
“We tried to do a deal with Huddersfield, I’ll be honest with you they were asking ridiculous demands. They wanted Josh Thewlis and Connor Wrench, that doesn’t work,” Fitzpatrick said at the recent fan forum event, via the Official Warrington Wolves podcast.
“The next one was George Williams, that doesn’t work.
“We couldn’t get to a solution unfortunately. Jake was disappointed as he wanted to come here and we wanted him to come here, but he was contracted to Huddersfield and they had a say in where he went as part of the deal obviously.
“We offered the swap with Toby King, but Toby has three years left on his contract with us and we’d have had to have paid him off with a substantial amount of money. It just didn’t make sense.”
“We wanted to do a deal with Jake but unfortunately what they were asking for just didn’t meet up with what we were asking for.”
Instead, Warrington head coach Daryl Powell goes into the 2023 season with Peter Mata’utia and Stefan Ratchford as his centres with Fitzpatrick assured that the latter would do a big job for the club after winning a Challenge Cup in that position.
