Gazzamatta
Coach
- Messages
- 15,608
I wonder if it was his contract ending year would Matto have made the same decision?
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If you pay the money it rewards the NRL. If you don’t it doesn’t.
Yeah I made it up. Bill never boned a tiger in the wild.
Would we be a better team with Moses and weaker in other areas or without him whilst being stronger in other areas? Good halfbacks are at a premium so I would say the former. The Storm used this model for years. I can’t remember the last time a side won the competition without at least one elite half.
Backfired with Papali’i though.
No it didn't. The alternative was letting the Tigers dictate our counteroffer. That would've been f**king stupid. Losing players is an easy problem to fix. Overpaying them is much more likely to cause other problems.
Demonstrably false since we tried to re-sign him. The club obviously changed its mind after the fact but it was too late.
Did we change our minds? We might've decided he was worth more after an extra year of performance under his belt, but when he signed with the Tigers he was still in flash-in-the-pan territory (and he knew it). Like Fifita's first year with the Titans.
Right. So the plan backfired because we misjudged the value of a player.
It's not about the value of one player, it's about the value of every player in your squad. You're better off letting ten talented youngsters go than overpaying for all ten of them. Because the ones you let go you can replace with the leftover cap space. The ones you overpay are stuck on your books, and that squeezes out other players that have reached their potential. We didn't make the grand final last year because of Papali'i, we made it because we had a bunch of players like him worth double what they were getting paid. Hopefully we have another bunch like that this year.
If he wasn’t value then we wouldn’t have tried to re-sign him. I would say the club has done a fair job at retaining players but that’s one they misjudged. I would say if we didn’t have Papali’i last season then we don’t make the grand final. With the quality of our bench that’s one player that would have come in handy this season. Here’s hoping the likes of Hopgood and Murchie turn out to above average players or we could be in trouble. Burton was surplus to needs because they have Luai and Cleary in the halves. Papali’i wasn’t surplus to needs. It was an error in judgment. Here’s hoping we get lucky and we can overcome it.
We didn't try to re-sign him until he had shown two full seasons of quality. That's twice as many seasons as it took to convince the Tigers to throw big money at him. He could just as easily have turned out another David Fifita. We're better off leaving those risks to the Tigers. Over the long run you'll lose more than you'll win. Which they do.
Without him we might not have lost it. He missed a hundred tackles ffs
Burton can play centre.
He was because we already have forwards who can run the ball. Without Papali'i we could've just given more ball to them. His strength is his attack so that's how we used him. What let us down last year was our defence.
It was an outlier in our very successful recruitment/retention strategy, and you are fixated on the single negative rather than looking at the overall success of the strategy.
We already got 'lucky' when we got so much footy out of him for so little cap space. Like you I hope we can be 'lucky' in future. I reckon we will.
Good way to f**k your cap
