On strengthening our front row depth for next year. Our current rotation of RCG and Paulo at the moment sucks. Whoever we bring on for when either of these two come off our middle generally weakens quite a bit and we lose momentum and allow the opposition team some breathing space and an opportunity to come back at us.
Now I know we have a couple of lower grade merkins that may come good in the lower grades but I am not totally convinced that they will. So with this in mind I think if we can pickup a decent player or two at the right price it would be well worth exploring.
There are two such players at the sharks in Royce Hunt and Franklin Pele that I wouldn't mind if we could sign. Hunt is an established player of around 30 NRL appearances and Pele is at the very beginning of his 1st grade career with only one NRL appearance back in 2021 but is still only a baby at 21 years of age.
Hunt is 26 years old, but I believe he is just about to come into his best years as a front rower and I have been watching him a little this year and like what I see. He is super strong and can carry the ball forward as good as anyone when he puts his mind to it. I think the one good thing about our coach is that he can get these types of players that have good potential but are not doing it on a regular enough basis to run hard and make their tackles much more effectively. Hell our coach has based his whole coach existence and career on just that.
So Hunt I feel would go up a gear or two under BA and would become a great 15-20 minute super sub in each half and help give our starting props some rest time without losing that momentum that they are providing while on. I know that Hunts average metres of 78m a game aren't earth shattering, but like I said, I think he can do a lot better if focused on and coached by someone like BA that loves pushing forwards to chase the collision. His tackle efficiency is 93.1 which if he maintained would be very good for a big forward.
If we could pick him up for anything under $300K I think he would make a great replacement for Kaufusi. Around $200-250k would be perfect. I feel we could easily get his average metres up to around 100m. But it's the brute strength and power that he has and therefore would help further drain the opposition just when they thought that they would be getting some relief that will be most advantageous to us. Something that we just don't get from our bench at present. He is just one of these types of players that needs to get aerobically fitter which will make him more consistent. Not that he is a fat merkin now, he just has to build those minutes into his legs.
As for Pele, I have spoken about him before so all I will say is he is a project player, that if we could get to fulfill his promise would be a wrecking ball type of player. He just need fitness, fitness, fitness. But could be anything and could go either way. These are the sorts of players I would be looking to bring to our club because they have major upsides if we can bring the best out of them. I would get rid of a some of the number fillers that I have seen playing in our NSW Cup side that you just know have very little chance of ever being 50+ NRL game players. We have way to many of those.
Both players are off contract at the end of this year.
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