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Rumours (signings, sackings & other NRL stuff)

Das Hassler

Bench
Messages
3,045
Im not sold on the JAC under Madge concept, I don’t think you can take the boy out of these star players. LM has been under Robinsons and now Bennett guidance and still screws up.

I think for JAC to stay out of trouble Melbourne is his best bet, but seeing as he’s back and forth between the two cities it’s only a matter of time before he’s linked back to another Sydney club


You do know he's already been given a conditional ok to come back to a Sydney club at the end of this season ?
Add...i may have misunderstood what you meant by "another"
 

The Rosco

Bench
Messages
2,888
I read a rumour about us looking at Aitken from the dragons.
I hope not . . . he's never struck me as a defensively smart centre . . . and the dragon's forum experts ( like us, I suppose) seem to throw up whenever Mary picks him.
Hopefully Madge sticks to quality, and not just pick the scraps of what's available.
 

Fordy20

Juniors
Messages
2,168
So we've got Momo, BJ, Talau, Mbye for the centres next year and apparently we are looking at Aitken? Doesn't make any sense.
 

Tigers Tale

Juniors
Messages
1,417
Wish we chased the Morris twins a couple years ago, people thought they were washed up but still give great value

Thought the same thing at the time...I reckon they were value and would have really added to our team. They wanted to play together but poor financial decisions by the club leading up to that ruined any chance.
 

Tigerm

First Grade
Messages
9,296
It's being reported the Greg Inglis has decided to come out of retirement and go play in England.

Good luck to him, wonder what Souths are thinking, as they paid him out in full with still 18 months left on his contract? Not sure if the NRL compensated them though.

Just waiting now for Sam Burgess to come back as well.
 

The unknown

Juniors
Messages
2,495
It's being reported the Greg Inglis has decided to come out of retirement and go play in England.

Good luck to him, wonder what Souths are thinking, as they paid him out in full with still 18 months left on his contract? Not sure if the NRL compensated them though.

Just waiting now for Sam Burgess to come back as well.

Watch him get home sick and come back to $ouff$ on a reduced contract.

The new rorters of the league.
 

Vic Mackey

Referee
Messages
24,615
wonder what Souths are thinking, as they paid him out in full with still 18 months left on his contract? Not sure if the NRL compensated them though.

Just waiting now for Sam Burgess to come back as well.

Souths didn’t pay out shit. It was a complete rort to get a fat hugely over paid player off their books. He was then paid $300k to run water (when he turned up) whilst only $100k went onto their salary cap. Then when the just as farcical Sam Burgess medical retirement was allowed it enabled them to sign 3 current Origin players

Meanwhile we are playing with a $600k salary cap penalty for offering a player a post retirement role, which he never even took up!!!
 

Tigerm

First Grade
Messages
9,296
One for the old Tiger fans. Could use his type now.

https://www.foxsports.com.au/nrl/nr...g/news-story/121c66e435a60423b2539bfbcde249dd

Olsen Filipaina was the garbo picked from reserve grade who made a wally out of ‘the King’

Olsen Filipaina remembers the day well.

“N***er,” came the shout from the Cumberland Oval crowd, as an empty bottle of KB hit the Balmain five-eighth square on the side of the head.

“Black b*****d,” said another Parramatta fan, as more objects rained down upon the Balmain five-eighth.

The projectiles eventually stopped, but the abuse continued.

“Coon”. “Go back to where you came from”. “Get back in your cage”.

Filipaina, for the record, had simply dared to square up to Parramatta’s Paul Taylor on that day in 1981.

Prejudice was a mainstay of his career. It’s why he adopted his iconic one-step goalkick. The quicker he booted the ball, he figured the quicker the taunting from the crowd would be over.

It came from opponents on the field, too, but never once did he fight back.

“I just wanted to play rugby league, I loved the game,” he says ahead of the release of his biography, The Big O – The Life and Times of Olsen Filipaina, next week.

“I didn’t want to fight back because I didn’t want to bring shame on my family. That’s one thing I promised my mum when I left New Zealand.”

It seems odd today – when close to 50 per cent of the NRL’s population is of Polynesian background – that such abuse was prevalent.

But this was the early eighties and Filipaina, the son of a Maori mother and Samoan father, was more or less flying the flag on his own.

Of the 341 players used in 1981, only three were Polynesian. There were the Danish-Tongan Sorensen brothers of Cronulla, and Lloyd Martin, a Maori halfback who had been in Australia since his teens.

Filipaina, though, was different. He arrived at Balmain in 1980, as a superstar import from Mangere East in the New Zealand competition. He wore pukka shells, had thighs as wide as the Gladesville bridge and played with an abandon which was being drummed out of the Australian game.

In 1981 and 1982 he was voted as the hardest hitter and the most difficult opponent to tackle.

He was nicknamed ‘the Galloping Garbo’ due to his other job – working on the bins with Ryde Council – one he still holds to this day, aged 63.

You would think that the arrival of a Kiwi Test star armed with a bumper fend and the ability to snap blokes in half would have been welcomed by those at Leichhardt Oval.

Balmain had toiled since the 1969 grand final, and here was this versatile back who could play with power and panache in equal measure.

His teammates, however, were angry that this fan-fared import had blocked their path to first grade. They saw him as a threat, the exotic outsider.

As such, they deliberately set out to maim him, something which haunts him to this day.

“It was all about bonuses, that extra $150 for making the first-grade squad. I ended up with a busted sternum,” he explains of a deliberate elbow in training. “I couldn’t get over it, I could accept it if it was an accident, but after a while it was happening so often.”

To make matters worse, Balmain coach Frank Stanton was old school.

Unlike today’s coaches, who go to great lengths to accommodate the needs of their players on an individual basis, Stanton couldn’t care less.

It was his one-size-fits-all approach, or reserve grade. He wanted Filipaina, with his bulky Polynesian build, to slim down.

He forced him to complete the Leichhardt Bay run in a wetsuit, and fined him for turning up to training late – in his garbo attire – because he’d taken a triple shift on a public holiday.

He was constantly dropping his star import and eventually Filipaina got sick of it, moving to Easts under Arthur Beetson.

But Beetson was just like Stanton, tough and uncompromising. This was Filipaina’s nadir. He was depressed, locking himself in his room for hours on end and playing in reserve grade. What made it harder was that the money he earned was going back to his father, who would gamble it on the horses.

“I could handle it if I knew my family was being looked after,” he explains. “But they weren’t. I didn’t find out what he was doing with it until later. But I’d send it, I’d never ask questions because I was brought up to respect my elders.”

One constant criticism of Filipina is that he was hot one week, cold the next. But given what was going on away from the playing field, it is easy to see why his mind may have been elsewhere.

Except for pulling on the black jersey of New Zealand, any love that he had for the game was gone. He wanted to return home. He had endured enough.

But then came the intervention of one of rugby league’s great man managers.

Graham Lowe, then Kiwis coach, knew all about Filipaina and what he could do.

Facing Australia in 1985’s three-match series, Lowe knew the way to get Filipaina ticking. It was through his mum, Sissie. Lowe rang her to ask if her son was up to the task of facing the Kangaroos. His focus was to man mark Wally Lewis, the game’s best player.

It was the spark that ignited Filipaina. But seriously, you may ask, a reserve grader facing off against Queensland’s king?

“The phone just went crazy, I had to take it off the hook,” says Filipaina. “I always wanted to meet the bloke, and I’d wondered why NSW hated him so much and called him Wally the W****r. I was a huge fan of his, so when we lost that first Test, I went to shake his hand and he just brushed me.”

The first Test in 1985 is best remembered for a brawl between Kevin Tamati and Australian prop Greg Dowling.

“We wanted to stand up and be counted,” says Filipaina. “Dowling called Tamati a n***er and that sparked all that off. We lost that first Test (26-20), but from there, we didn’t take a backward step.”

The Kiwis had not beaten the Kangaroos in 14 years. They were sick of being treated like second-class citizens. Tamati’s flurry of fists, and Lewis’ indifference to his opposite number, was the line in the sand.

The second Test was nip and tuck, with Australia only scoring in the last 60 seconds to win 10-6.

The closeness of the scoreline and the performance of Australia prompted large-scale fallouts along the state lines, all played out in the public eye. The Kangaroos were rattled.

“We were devastated by that second Test,” says Filipaina. “The third was at Carlaw Park and we saw them on the way to the ground on their bus. We stopped at the traffic lights, looked across and said to ourselves: ‘no c*** on that bus scores a try today’. And they didn’t.”

Filipaina was at his scheming best, chipping on the second tackle, busting through Kangaroos defenders at a rate of knots. In short, doing things that the straight-jacketed, robotic Australian game didn’t know how to handle.

It set the tone for a historic Kiwis victory and it was the first time Australia had been held scoreless in 29 years, going down 18-0.

Soon after, Filipaina retired from Kiwis duty, and went on to play for Norths and Bowral, as well as playing in Samoa’s first-ever Test.

When rugby union legend Jonah Lomu was invited on to an episode of This Is Your Life, Filipaina, a leaguie, was his sole guest. It stands as testament to his legacy. Where Filipaina led the way, others followed.

It is that, and not the wins over Australia, which give him the most pleasure. As he contemplates retirement later this year after 40 years on the same bin run, he says: “It was that I helped open the door for a lot of the Kiwi kids.

“Guys like Ruben Wiki, Stacey Jones, right through to today. I told them the Polynesians were coming! I’m just glad the younger guys are getting paid what they are worth and I’m happy they didn’t have to put up with what I went through.”
 

BrotherJim05

Bench
Messages
3,408
If we can get Reynolds and Packer off our books by the end of 2020 then we will be in really good shape for a recruitment drive...however unless we make finals I don't think there will be many players looking to move here.
 

Tigerm

First Grade
Messages
9,296
If we can get Reynolds and Packer off our books by the end of 2020 then we will be in really good shape for a recruitment drive...however unless we make finals I don't think there will be many players looking to move here.
Well, not the ones we need.
 

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