The length of some of the extensions circa 2022 and 2023 was raising some eyebrows. Lane, Matto and Sivo's for example...
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The length of some of the extensions circa 2022 and 2023 was raising some eyebrows. Lane, Matto and Sivo's for example...
Everyone was on the vinegar stroke and thought it was the beginning of a dynasty. In hindsight it was the last squeeze of the lemon.
The response was poor for the same reason we lost those players in the first place; salary cap pressure.
An extra year for an older player is one way to keep his price down. These merkins are concerned about their futures, so the extra security is worth money to them.
There aren’t enough first graders to fill 17 top 30 squads. Teams are lucky if they have 15 of them. So the bottom half of the top 30 is going to have some nuffies. Proven reserve graders are a good place to find NRL backups, and Momoisea/Cini were certainly proven against grown men. And if they don’t work out it’s no big deal. They are only blocking other nuffies from getting a run, and there’s still plenty more nuffies to choose from. The problem is that we needed to pick nuffies at all, and that was due to injuries, which are out of our hands.
Agree with all of that... I still think there's a reason why he was allowed to walk by 3 other clubs before we got him. Parra is the only club to have re-signed him I'm pretty sure and when we did, it was for 4 more years FFS! He showed potential at all 3 previous clubs yet none of them seemed overly bothered about him not being part of their future plans enough to want to wrap him up and extend. He showed plenty of promise when he was at the Dogs. Was good at Manly too and obviously played career best footy in 2022 but there's something off about the bloke IMO...
Like I said, he wasn't on his own there.
Signing Hodgson 2 weeks after Mahoney left back in December 2021 for the 2023 season.
His documentary had a bit of a defeatist attitude about him.
Your mistake is thinking it's possible to make 30 good choices. Every NRL club has nuffies on the roster. Every single one. Cini and Momoisea both played more first grade for other clubs than they did for us, so there was no harm. They didn't stop us picking better nuffies when we needed to bring a backup into the team. AMS, Tago and Mulitalo were all preferred to Cini, and Momoisea was behind such stars as Doorey and Murchie. To complain about a team's backups is barking up the wrong tree. It's our senior players who let us down these past two years, not a couple of blokes who combined for three NRL appearances.
Quality coaches can still get there nuffies to perform to the ability or sometimes slightly above there potential with simple roles and a positive mindset to get the best out of them.
I'm sure it's why the coach was sacked. For the previous five years he got the best out of the squad, even in 2023 with all the unavailable players. But last year they were just garbage across the board, as soon as Moses went down. It's like they lost their self belief, or maybe I'm just projecting, because that's when I thought the season might be over. After such a good won against Manly too.
Liddle's not as good a player as Hodgson but in hindsight at least he was able to stay on the field.
