Pou- You a walking f**kn contradiction....
No I'm not.
You bang on about ACADEMY
It was a great idea. Unfortunately it blew out our NYC cap in 2014 so we seem to have binned it.
So what is the idea of it? To get good value from young guys before they demand the bigger contracts.
Yes.
Yet we block their path by signing established first graders making the Academy pointless.
Yeah I think the 'academy' got the arse last year. Or we weren't recruiting the type of kids we needed. How could we have kept Aloiai and Matterson? By not signing Scott or Foran? These two brought something we needed, that NYC graduates don't bring - leadership.
French looks to have a pathway to first grade, as does any middle forward (in this case Twal). I hoped we'd keep Fuimaono, and he stars in NYC, but have we even seen him in reserve grade yet? I already said I thought signing Jennings was a mistake, as was probably the retention of Takairangi. But those two make our squad strong right now. And we need to be competitive ASAP. If not for backstabbers leaking to the NRL we'd probably be top four right now, so Jennings and whoever else were good short term signings, and we have been out of the finals so long we couldn't afford to look long term.
We are (were) still getting good value out of 'academy' products Radradra, Moeroa and Paulo. Unfortunately if you're going to bring a lot of youngsters into a team you need good leadership, and we had to go out and buy some. The 'academy' doesn't work in isolation. Youngsters need to come into a good culture, and we didn't have that while Hayne and Sandow were our two highest paid players. Arthur didn't sign those two.
There is no point having strong juniors if you are just going to let them go when they are close to ready to first grade and sign already established guys on full market value or on overs.
You have been going on about Academy for years yet now your backflipping. After you read this you will come up with some more bullshit to in your head feel like your right.
Where have I backflipped? I still think the 'academy' is a good idea, but it looks like our timing was off with the last batch. Hopefully French and Twal kill it, along with the batch currently in SG Ball. Fuimaono is obviously getting better offers elsewhere, but where would we play him? Will he be a better player than Takairangi next year? He hasn't even played reserve grade.
