My two cents.
When we have Cherrington on the field, we have looked pretty much the same. Cherrington would be on under 200k, possibly nearer 100k.
Farah has handed the reigns to the halves, he's no longer the centrepiece of the play, rightly so.
We DO lose him for ages in the middle of the season. Despite Hackfield's dismissal of the point.
He has become very fragile.
He doesn't make line breaks anymore. His short kicks deep on the attack don't work. He barely ever gets penalties with his dashes from dummy half. His passing is slow and often behind or out in front of the man. He doesn't dominate in tackles, he makes lots of them but he gets pushed backwards 9 times out of 10 after contact.
He has a history of causing fractures in the club, has been responsible or partly responsible for the sacking of two coaches, and is a walking negative headline.
He is used to losing. Has played finals three times in his career spanning 11 years and lost 3 Origin series. He is conditioned to failure. He really doesn't fit a "winning culture" when most of our juniors are coming from comp winning teams…
He is owed $1,000,000 a year for the next two years. If someone else took half of that and we bought a rookie and a decent forward with fast legs who can tackle hard we would have a more competitive team. If someone took him and paid $300,000 of that we could still buy a forward who runs and tackles hard, I'm sure we could find one somewhere, and heaven knows that we need intimidating big and hard forwards, more than we need an aging dummy half.
It's mostly not his fault, but it would be ridiculous to accept all these facts and not do anything about it.
If he wants to stay he needs to hand over his Blues jersey so that he's worth more to the Tigers by playing the whole damn year and he needs to produce some serious form otherwise Cherrington will be taking his jersey. I don't care if he's on a mill, if Cherrington is playing better than him, Cherrington should play nine.
Playing him in reserve grade is dumb though. There is no doubt that he's in our best 17 players. I'd put him on the bench or even at 13, but Cherrington has been on par with him this year and I expect he'll improve and Farah will go backwards further emphasizing the point.
The only thing they've done wrong is threaten to put him in reserve grade, Farah and that derp Sam Ayoub have almost certainly leaked every minor detail about the situation to the media and are responsible for blowing this up the way it has. For a guy that claims to bleed Wests Tigers he just LOVES destabilizing the damn place. He'd be a better club man if he saw the situation for what it is and offered to play out the rest of his contract without taking a mid season sabbatical to get injured playing for a team that isn't responsible for paying him a million bucks a year, or went to England. If he cares about Wests Tigers as much as he cares about himself he will make the right decision and give up the Origin jersey, that would REALLY mean digging his heels in and he'll have drawn a line in the sand showing that he really means it.
I'm no Taylor fan, but I'm on board with this decision.