DiegoNT
First Grade
- Messages
- 9,378
To be fair to rsag he did write that sam should be dropped mid season. It's easy to say in hindsight it was a stupid thing to say, but at the time he said it i don't think it was to unreasonable. Sam finished the year in good form and looked to recapture some of his spark but it was a different story mid season.
At the time we were on a big losing streak and sam was poor. He was still getting good stats, but his runs lacked effort, his tackling and defence was sloppy (ryan james ran over him twice for tries in the titans game) and his error rate was astronomical. He was far from the player he was, and considering he was on comparable money to the Thurstons and smith's of the comp it just wasn't good enough. There was also still the talk of a fractured squad floating around at the time that sam always featured in the rumours in, coffs harbour and all that plus we had to shed so many players to fit him back in and a lot of people weren't happy. While i think rsag's solution of dropping him was too far, it wasn't entirely unreasonable because at that point of the season something had to he done as what was happening at the club wasn't working. And that something was done, imo, when the were rumours leaked around that the club were looking to move tom on. I think that put everyone on notice, even sam, and showed there was no favouritism within the club ( the rumours were that the burgii were close to crowe and split with sections of the team). I don't think it's a coincidence in the week after the tom rumour that sam had his best game of the season against sam, his runs started to have purpose like he was trying to trample people again, his defence sharpened and he got that Mongrel back, and his error rate dropped as well.
At the time we were on a big losing streak and sam was poor. He was still getting good stats, but his runs lacked effort, his tackling and defence was sloppy (ryan james ran over him twice for tries in the titans game) and his error rate was astronomical. He was far from the player he was, and considering he was on comparable money to the Thurstons and smith's of the comp it just wasn't good enough. There was also still the talk of a fractured squad floating around at the time that sam always featured in the rumours in, coffs harbour and all that plus we had to shed so many players to fit him back in and a lot of people weren't happy. While i think rsag's solution of dropping him was too far, it wasn't entirely unreasonable because at that point of the season something had to he done as what was happening at the club wasn't working. And that something was done, imo, when the were rumours leaked around that the club were looking to move tom on. I think that put everyone on notice, even sam, and showed there was no favouritism within the club ( the rumours were that the burgii were close to crowe and split with sections of the team). I don't think it's a coincidence in the week after the tom rumour that sam had his best game of the season against sam, his runs started to have purpose like he was trying to trample people again, his defence sharpened and he got that Mongrel back, and his error rate dropped as well.
