I'm starting to find it genuinely baffling that Warren McDonald still has his job. The way the Tigers have gone about signing and re-signing players is looking likely to keep us rooted in the bottom six for the next three years - and longer if the same people are allowed to keep making the decisions.
Here's the rap sheet, ignoring for now the second tier players:
**Players in**
**Blair**: In the frame for worst signing of all time given the size and length of his contract, and what's worse a competent club could have seen it coming. The fact that Blair at Melbourne was clearly 90% the product of the system he played is now obvious to all but the most blinkered, but how did our club not only miss that but also pay this waste of a jersey as if he's Sonny Bill Williams?
**Anasta**: Yes, theoretically the jury is still out but by the time he comes back 20% of his contract duration will have gone and we've seen nothing so far. A nonentity in the pack with some of the weakest numbers you can imagine, his best position is apparently the same as our best-paid player. So why did we sign him?
**Tuqiri**: I'm listing him here but really the biggest crime is re-signing him for this season when he was already carrying a serious injury that has kept him out of the side for the best part of two years. I don't care if he's on the mimimum - we could use that minimum now to bring in something close to a first grader. Last season there were three mid-season signings that clearly show how valuable it can be to have some flexibility in your cap to pick up guys whose faces don't fit elsewhere - how useful to us could Mason, Inu or Perrett be right now? Yet we persist with giving sweetheart deals to an injured, old winger.
**Players retained**
**Moltzen**: The biggest panic move I've ever seen. You have to laugh when you realise the guy we have bobbing around for his utility value actually can't play anywhere except a position where we genuinely have a good, cheap young option.
**Marshall**: I'm not going to get into the debate about whether Marshall should be out of the side right now. But what we're just about to do is sign ourselves up to be paying star wages to the 34-year-old version of Marshall. Is this a guy who is showing signs of being a good five-eighth at that age? As he gets slower he will need a better kicking game absolutely without a doubt, and at the moment he is in his late 20s and is, conservatively, in the bottom half of the comp in terms of five-eighth kicking ability. Unless he changes that this contract will be an albatross by 2015, yet the Tigers are apparently happy to sign him up to it when his value must be as low as it could possibly be. Absolutely the worst thing about this deal is I have a distinct feeling we are bidding against ourselves, too: what other club would come in with close to a million a year for four more years of this guy at this point?
In case you think I'm being a hater, I should say I like the Farah re-signing because at least he's a player who has some chance of still being good (though probably not elite) into his 30s. I don't know what they're paying Pat Richards so I'll let that go too, though if there's serious money going to a 32 year old winger with a lot of miles on the clock it's difficult to see a positive outcome. I didn't hate the decisions to let Heighington and Ryan go, and Gibbs was lucky to get away relatively injury-free last year so I think that was ok business on balance of probabilities. As for Fifita, I guess that might be a Sheens issue so at least it gets a pass. But the point is we haven't made a good marquee signing since Ellis and we continually re-sign players who aren't going to justify what they're getting.
The point is that it is going to be virtually impossible to put together a winning side over the next few years when so much money is going on old or bad 'stars', especially when we get to the point where we have to start paying Woods, Tedesco etc serious coin. You win in this comp by getting value across the board for what you're spending: if you're paying someone to be a star they'd better deliver. The Tigers clearly haven't been getting that - and there are contracts on the books now that will continue to fail to deliver that value. Even if our juniors are as good as we hope they will only have a tiny window to win before we have to start letting most of them go because we can't afford to up their money as so much is going to dead wood.
