Is it a case of our biggest strength, sometimes becoming our biggest liability?
The strength of having family members and very close friends as part of our team is of course a strength when everything is going well, but when it comes to having to make decisions on who to keep and who to let go, you can see how it would make it very tricky and hard to keep everyone happy.
AD is seemingly very close with Twal and Seyfarth.
I know many of our fans could not care less if we offloaded AD and it upset Seyfarth and some may also not care if it upset Twal, but Seyfarth and Twal are important parts of our forward depth, so we need to keep them unless we can replace them other players as good or better on similar contract values which is easier said than done.
Turuva’s starting position his starting to come under question and he is very well paid, I would say overpaid for the qualities he provides. But he is Api’s cousin and Api played a major role in getting him to the club, so it would no doubt upset Api if we were to even consider letting Turuva look at other options shortly after re-signing with us.
Same story with the May brothers. They are a package deal and now both need to live up to their big money contracts, so it would be almost impossible to offload one and not the other if either of them do not perform up to standard.
Then we have the Fainu brothers who are also no doubt somewhat of a package deal.
We supposedly have Sione contracted for somewhere around 350 - 400k which I believe is very reasonable for a player of his calibre.
Samuela no doubt will need to be upgraded from what was rumoured to be a 500k per season contract with us.
I would say if we offer him 800k with ratchet clauses which would make his contract very similar to what is has been reported the Bulldogs are paying Jacob Preston, I think that would be very fair and our limit.
Latu would be very hard to price. Due to a bad run of injuries, suspensions and Benji not really handling his development all that well, we ideally want to keep him, but we do not know for certain if he will fulfill his potential.
I think we probably have to match his previous 500k contract which is a lot of money to find out if he lives up to his potential, therefore I hope we do not go any higher than that until we him regularly play well and at times dominate as an NRL halve.
We can obviously upgrade him if he does start fulfilling his potential.
