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@Cultured_Bogan said in Ryan Papenhuyzen:
@jirskyr said in Ryan Papenhuyzen:
@Cultured_Bogan said in Ryan Papenhuyzen:
@jirskyr said in Ryan Papenhuyzen:
@Cultured_Bogan said in Ryan Papenhuyzen:
@Furious1 said in Ryan Papenhuyzen:
@Lauren said in Ryan Papenhuyzen:
Buzz said on Controversy Corner tonight that Storm tried to shop him around to all 15 clubs in DEC, even offering to cover $80K.
Happy to see him to get his opportunity. I thought he looked electric and was great for them the other night.
Tedesco actually credits the Blues camp for helping with the change in his (running) technique, he said it on the Matty Johns show about a month or so ago.
Also another point to consider is, wouldn’t both those clubs have far more superior training facilities than us?
Teddy doesn’t give Wests Tigers credit for anything. He would rather we were wiped from history than have to re-live that he came through our system.
I reckon, anyone who says he’ll do a LeBron is kidding themselves. It was a one way trip when he left.
The guy certainly is revisionist. As in he apparently always was a passionate Roosters supporter, same with his family etc., even though he grew up in Camden, but his junior side had Roosters colours. Apparently. Then he’s fab mates with Miniciello all of a sudden because they went to the World Cup together for 6 weeks, even though he’d spent the previous 7 years in the Magpies/Tigers system.
Screw him. I get it, he wanted to be in a better side and more success - I can understand the allure. But it’s heartless and soul-less to me and that will forever dent my opinion of him. The real legends of the game in my eyes are the ones that stick with what they’ve got and make their home team better, not join a cherry-picked team of blokes on great wickets.
They are a soulless glamour club the Roosters, I reckon my old Granny would be embarrassed how the core values of her side has changed, being an old Paddington girl back in the days when it was far more working class and much of Sydney was poor. Even when you look at membership - Roosters are clearly one of the most successful clubs of the membership era and they have the third-lowest 2019 membership, ahead of only Manly and Titans! They are 6K behind Tigers and 16K behind Rabbits!
And honestly - who are the Roosters players that have the long-standing admiration of the league? Pretty much nobody of the last 10 years. Perhaps Mitch Aubusson simply because he’s an honest footballer with a slightly limited skillset, but just plays hard wherever they put him. If the Roosters were full of Aubos it would be a different thing, but they aren’t, they are full of nonsense self-motivators like Cronk, guns for hire like Tedesco and arrogant lairs like Latrell.
There you go, unexpected anti-Roosters rant over.
By all means keep going mate, I’m with you
Well then if you say so… you know what really interests me at this time? Emerging parallels between NRL and EPL.
I recently started following Premier League for the first time because I wanted a summer sport to follow, and see if anything clicked. PLENTY of battler teams in England, despite all the glamour, most sides are just toilers who never win any silverware, so plenty of options. But also I didn’t really want to take on a side of losers; if I lacked skin in the game, I might as well pick a decent side that I can also support.
But that being by-the-by, obviously Man City and Liverpool duked it out for the premiership this year, with everyone else distant 3rd. Liverpool ended up second with enough points to have basically won the EPL any other year, kind of like running a PB to break the world record, only to have Usain Bolt break it by a larger margin 6 strides in front of you.
So I previously have no skin, no age-old rivalry or geography to fall back on… what are my feelings towards Man City? That they are a soul-less, arrogant, crushing team of football robots. That their owner is an Emirati of such privilege that he is part of the UAE royal family, is deputy prime minister and half-brother to the president. Oh, and he’s put 1.3B pounds (!) into Man City over the past 10 years.
So it’s no wonder that Man City sweep all before them, because they operate on about $300M AUD per season, can afford to buy the world’s best manager, world’s best players from anywhere their long arms can reach. There’s no shock here, it’s the brute force of Arab oil dollars. The club was third-tier 20 years ago, got back to mid-table Premier League 15 years ago and hasn’t dropped outside the top echelon for the past 10 years. The money correlates with results.
And now, Man City are being referred to the judiciary for apparent breaching of “financial fair play”, which, as I understand it, is like a piss-weak version of the salary cap that serves to stop excessively ludicrous money being poured into football sides, rather than just the normal level ludicrous. Allegedly, the Man City owners used external sponsorship deals to circumvent the Fair Play rules - sound much like TPAs and salary cap? And ultimately, it may cost Man City a Champions League spot next year.
In terms of roster, Man City have 6 actual Englishmen in their Top 25 (though that’s pretty standard for top-tier EPL) - so the club is run, financed and rostered basically by non-British interests. I have no admiration for them, no good feeling, no sympathy.
Now the interesting part - my mate is a Liverpool man born and bred, I mean literally - he grew up not far from Liverpool. Liverpool had their best season in ages, basically lost the comp by 1 match, making the Champions League final as well… but couldn’t win the home title. Liverpool aren’t short of a buck either and although they’ve been top-flight for longer than Man City, they’ve been owned by American businessmen for 20 years, so their heritage is also somewhat undermined by big-time non-British dollars.
So I say to my friend: “Aren’t you shitty with Man City, don’t you bristle with the way they’ve basically bought a premiership? They didn’t earn it, they bought it. That even though Liverpool are big-league, Man City are so much bigger again in terms of financial backing that you may never compete with them? That basically the EPL is 6 or 7 top teams and the rest are so far away that they’ll never truly compete, and that Man City are in another level by themselves?”
And he says “no, because Man City play beautiful football.”
And that part I’ll never understand. Of course they play beautiful football! For 150M pounds per season, how could you expect anything less than amazing and beautiful football? And how can you be happy with that? I mean if that’s your view, why not give all of Liverpool’s money to Man City and reduce the opposition so much that Man City will play football of such beauty every week; that they will crush all opposition everywhere (like they did on the weekend winning 6-blot in the FA Cup Final) and you can sit there with unbridled wet-pants joy watching oil money turned into goals, like some sort of weird Footballing Rumpelstiltskin.
Well I can’t do it. Maybe it’s an Australian thing, to reject the lack of authenticity, the BS, the idea that dollars makes winners. On a small-scale, the Roosters have become like the Man City of the NRL - everything is going right for them off-field, they manage a stacked side and they win when it counts. They have big business and smart operators working for them off-field. Sure as hell the fans aren’t, their memberships and home crowds are shocking.
And it’s not Roosters fan’s fault that smart wealthy operators are pouring their money in. Even though they are happy or willfully ignorant of it, that they think their team might actually be something like the other regular sides. That they can’t see the difference between the Cowboys and the Roosters because they are blinded by privilege. And I don’t blame the NRL specifically either, any more than I can blame UEFA or the EPL for having some limited capacity to slow down Man City.
But I cannot enjoy or respect it. Roosters have an amazing roster and sometimes they blow teams away with spectacular football, but it leaves an ashen taste in my mouth. And that’s where Tedesco went, he joined the Man City of the NRL, because someone took him in a helicopter somewhere, because he got free drinks on a boat, because he doesn’t have to pay rent anymore; he now has new friends in higher places, and he wants to win comps and he doesn’t want to do all the work getting there.
In this case, it seems you can take Camden out of the boy.
You can apply the same principle to the La Liga. I follow Bilbao and the league is a two and a half horse race between Real and Barca with Atletico occasionally popping up to win one.
Bilbao practice cantera, they will not play any kids who do not come through the ranks in the Basque country. Hard for them to compete when clubs like United, City, Chelsea, Juventus etc come knocking and pinch quality players like Herrera, Laporte, Kepa and Llorente. Keeps the coffers full but when you don’t just sign any big name you’re never going to be competitive against the heavyweights.
Good point these kids are happy to stay at clubs as long as they are successful
If the success doesn’t follow they will look for it elsewhere
As a WHU supporter I saw it happen with Dimitri Payet and reckon we will see something very similar happen with Declan Rice
He has already dumped Ireland for England …switching clubs will be far easier
