TheRam
Coach
- Messages
- 13,885
Yes very un-captain like. Time for the club to put a time for him to accept offer or pull it. Only supposition but obviously his agent has given him a figure which he has in his head which is less than club has offered which is stalling negotiations. His manager is asking him to wait for a bigger figure to come otherwise he looks like a goose because he can't get the offer he told Gutho he could get. I don't believe MON will be the one blinking first in this standoff.
If Gutho remains unsigned for '23 time for the club to talk to Raiders to get Xavier Savage for that year. I'm sure he doesn't want to play second fiddle to clock stand for the next few years.
Once Savage proves(if) he can handle the week to week bash and barge of the NRL then he will be way to dynamic and lethal ball runner to keep on the wing. I predict that he will be the starting fullback within the 2022 season and that the Raiders will opt to move Nicoll-klokstad to the centres where they have deficiencies and need to strengthen.
If my expectations of him are right he will be way to hard and expensive to prise from the Raiders then. We needed or need to get him now, before the kid becomes the next Pap and he attracts all the headlines and hype that will follow him.
If we were to give Gutho a deadline of say 2 weeks from now and he let it laps, I would pull it and then go talk to Savage and offer him $600K to move immediately and offer Matterson up as a peace offering and an exchange to the Raiders to help it happen.
And before you say it Pou, yes I know we can't force a player to go somewhere that they don't want to go. But we can make it more lucrative for him to go to the Raiders and add an extra $100K to his pocket if he is willing to make the move for example and we would still be better off salary cap wise then if we re-signed Gutho. The point is there are many ways to move players on or make players move early from their current clubs. We just need to be proactive and have a little imagination.
But then again we have Russell and that may mean we lose him. He seems a real talent, but Savage looks to have that something special and will be an X factor player and could lay claim to being the fastest player in the NRL, even faster then Saab, but way more skillful.
None of this will happen of course, since we have Russell already on our books. So I'm sure that our club sees him as Gutho's successor already and if for whatever reason Gutho were to leave he would be given the opportunity to prove himself and make that position his own. Which makes sense too.