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Club bosses will be furious with NRL over the Knights offer to Kalyn Ponga
Mike Colman, The Courier-Mail
November 19, 2016 11:57pm
Subscriber only
I AM thinking rugby league kingpins John Grant and Todd Greenberg will not be getting a friendly welcome home from the NRL club bosses when they return from the Four Nations final.
More likely they will be met with placards asking: “What the #$%^ is going on?’’
Newcastle’s offer of $3.5 million to snare Cowboys’ teenager Kalyn Ponga after a grand total of two games has to be one of the most disruptive moves in the game’s history.
Forget about the pressure it has put the kid under. That’s a matter for him, his family and his bank manager to mull over.
Forget, too, that the Knights are the worst-performed team in the competition and unless they can also buy some muscle and nous to give him support, Ponga is going to spend five years picking lumps of turf out of his teeth. That’s a matter for him, his family and his dentist.
Forget that two-game veteran Ponga would be earning more than established players at the Knights, including Origin star Dane Gagai. That’s a matter for him, the players and the dressingroom.
And you can even forget that the Knights could be making the biggest financial faux pas since their former owner Nathan Tinkler thought it would be a good idea to go into the horse racing business. That’s a matter for them, their fans and their financial backers.
Just who are their financial backers, you may ask? The NRL of course.
Since Tinkler walked away the Knights have been under the control of the NRL.
So when we say Newcastle are throwing $3.5 million at an untried kid in the hope he will lead them out of the wilderness, we are really saying the NRL is.
Which must make the Cowboys absolutely ecstatic. Here they are, after years of struggle, finally breathing a bit of clean air at the top of the pile, and the organisation they work for is pulling the rug out from under them.
It is not only the Cowboys who will be feeling that. The Queensland and Federal governments will be less than overjoyed as well.
They have committed $240 million to build a stadium as part of a major redevelopment of the Townsville city area, with the Cowboys and NRL coming up with $10 million.
By the time the first game is played there Johnathan Thurston will probably have hung up the boots, along with most of the 2015 premiership-winning team.
Ponga, the brightest star on the Cowboys’ books would be seen as a key attraction in getting paying customers through the gates. He might still be doing that, but in Newcastle.
But the thing that will really be sending the other clubs into a spin is the fact that this offer will throw the entire player market upside down.
If Ponga is worth $700,000 a season at the age of 18, what does that make Thurston, Anthony Milford, Shaun Johnson, Darius Boyd or any of the other 250 established players worth on the open market?
More to the point, what can the management of off-contract Valentine Holmes ask?
After all, he is still only 21, has played almost 60 NRL games, has won a premiership and represented Australia. And what can the clubs afford to pay? The simple answer is, they don’t know.
In yet another twist to an already murky scenario, the NRL has yet to announce the salary cap for 2018 and beyond.
The Cowboys, along with every other club, are fighting with two hands tied behind their backs.
They can’t open the chequebooks to keep their players because they don’t know how much money they have to spend.
Who said rugby league was a game played on a level playing field?
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