This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but are we?
To me with KP it goes both ways. I definitely don’t feel that he’s overpaid in comparison to some of the blokes we have on our books, but he barely gets on the field and despite his experience now, and being on 1.4 mil, some weeks we’re still asking why he’s not getting involved.
To me he and his family have made no secret that their biggest priority is balance and life outside of football and setting KP and the family up outside of football.
He knowingly and happily came to a wooden spoon club who offered him the most money. In 2022, if he’d said that his main priority was to win a comp and was happy to take a substantial pay cut to do so, there would have been a tonne of interest outside of us and the Dolphins.
Serious question, does anyone actually think that a good team (I.e. a Panthers or Storm who are a consistent genuine premiership side) would pay Ponga even close to what we are for the amount of time he’s on the field and impact he’s had? Absolutely not. Not in a million years.
So I don’t really buy into this talk circulating that we’re holding him back. He and his Dad were happy to stay, despite the fact that they’re both acutely aware of the fact that Kalyn’s salary is going to impact on what we can put around him in other areas.
We get a lot wrong as a club but there’s no denying we’ve treated that family extremely well.
From 2018 - 2023 Cleary has played 118 games for Panthers and Ponga has played 108 for us. That's accounting for the fact they've made 4 straight grand finals and we've largely been a non-feature in the finals. If you include 2024, its 118 vs 110.
Cleary is supposedly on 1.1 - 1.2M, but if we're being serious, he's likely getting more than that when his Dad is the coach - a very nice workaround the Panthers have access to.
Now obviously Cleary has helped bring the Panthers more success than Ponga has. I would argue Ponga has won more games individually than Cleary has though, because he has to. Have you compared our two squads over the last few years? They're not even in the same stratosphere. Ponga being on 2 - 300k more than Cleary doesn't account for how embarrassing our squad is in comparison.
Storm, well, they're hard to compare. They have one of the GOAT coaches. Their 7 is a fullback converted into one of the best halfbacks in the game. They've loaded up their spine with plodders elsewhere. The sad thing is most of their plodders are still better than our plodders, because of the coach and club culture.
You left out the Roosters - who definitely would pay an obscene amount for Ponga because that's literally their trump card. It'd probably just show up as 1M on the cap, though.
Ponga has had a mixed year largely due to the foot injury, but the Panthers game is the only where I've felt he genuinely phoned it in. There's no doubt we needed better from him on that day.
You get Ponga a squad around him that is even remotely competent and earning their $$$, and unfortunately probably a different coach, then we'll have another look and see if his contract is an issue. He really is quite low on the list of our problems for me.
