Facing the media: Robbie Farah on Wednesday morning after being told he is no longer wanted by Wests Tigers. Credit:Getty Images Telling him he will be in reserve grade if he holds up his end of a legally binding agreement with Wests Tigers should not be accepted as common practice between employer and employee in this situation. The RLPA should not tolerate it and neither should the NRL because it is an attempt to circumvent the salary cap. It is a mechanism that allows a club to escape paying the consequences of poor decisions. If it was a poor decision to sign Farah for so long, then the club must pay the price for that decision – not Farah. Bad luck. He did nothing wrong They must pay him for the next two years and if that means they lose matches, players and money, so be it. Of course, no club would do this if they could get out of it. They should not be permitted to get out of it.

By intimidating a star player into leaving, a club can counter a system which is intended to evenly distribute talent throughout the NRL and make for more competitive matches. This tactic is obscenely skewed in favour of the clubs and against the interests of both the players and the sport. It's OK to say your boss can make you go and work in the mail room so you leave. But chances are, your industry is not governed by a salary cap or another artificial mechanism that is aimed at a parity between competitors. The only difference between intimidating a player into leaving by bullying him and enticing him to stay with a paper bag full of cash is that no-one is likely to tell us about the paper bag. They are both salary cap rorts. I believe that in professional sports, blatantly trying to force a highly paid player out of a club is a salary cap issue and that salary cap auditor should have the power to intervene. In the case of Robbie Farah, the salary cap auditor would have every right to find that he is being left out of first grade, not on merit, but as an attempt to manipulate the club's salary cap by hastening his departure. And the NRL should have the right to find that his salary is to be included in Wests Tigers cap for the next two years anyway, whether he is there or not.

The fact that clubs can artificially alter their cap position by treating players in this way is objectively outrageous and hurts the image of rugby league. Clubs obviously do not have the same responsibility as role models to that which binds players. We need to fix this. Coaches, CEOs and match officials should be role models too, The RLPA should not stand for it and neither should the NRL. League is more than just the NRL I'll give the League lesson a miss this week and discuss something else: exhibition games in America. Discord wants to make it clear we support playing exhibition games to capitalise on Jarryd Hayne's success in San Francisco. We support Brisbane playing Penrith in Hawaii.

But we need to realise that rugby league is not just the NRL and, as part of the new television deal, parts of the season have become more clearly defined and internationally integrated. NRL clubs can't just go off and do what they want, when they want, anymore. The pre-season is for club-based activity. The World Club Series will likely expand to eight clubs before long, and teams will make stops before and after these games to promote the sport in new areas. NRL comp games will be played overseas before long, with teams on their way back from the WCS. The post season is for internationals. Good on the NRL for reminding Brisbane and Penrith their Australian players basically forced the first Great Britain tourists in 23 years to stay home because they were too tired – and then came up with a jolly in Hawaii at the same time as that series would have been played. If the players are going to quote the mandatory stand-down period to avoid playing Tests, then they deserve to have it quoted back to them when they want to play a game on an end of season trip.