@Jimmy 100% agreed.

Whatever Mbye is, he is not the number 9 we are looking for.
Maybe for 20 minutes to give the regular 9 a break. Not a good solution there at all.

I have no idea why we did not buy Issac Luke cheaply and let him goto the Dragons.

Back to Latrell
We could lure him here.

He has said he will sign for Money. We just bid huge overs. Newcastle did it by bidding 1M for David Klemmer. Sure David is a good player, but they probably overpayed for him a bit.

I also expected this to reap rewards for them. As they get some good talent into their side. It did not, I am not convinced that their problems are just coaching…
Shiz their forward lineup is not lacking one bit. https://www.newcastleknights.com.au/teams/

Anyway if we want Latrell, pay him 1.4M. His management has said $$$ will sway him. OK. UP the ante.

Now I don’t think for a second we should do this. I don’t see Latrell as that player who you could build a team around. But we could get him at a price (probably the next 5 years being outside the 8 price).

Anyone else sick of Coming 9th?

Every season we make this recruitment bolt, we get enough players to get over the line… We make a dash and we just miss the top 8 (or worse). What’s the point!

Yes, everyone I know is tired of hearing about another “team building” year. I am too. But have we truly had one? We seem to do this massive bolt for each year to just scrape, out of the finals.

Lets aim to come 14 this year. Yes 14th. We frontend a few contracts we sign. Only hire people who will peak in 2-3 years time. Free up our cap space in 2021/2022 so that we are actually competitive. Meanwhile we fill any gaps with 80k juniors and give them a shot at first grade? Then by 2021/2022 we will have the cash to get good players where we need them.

@happy_tiger said in Another year coming 9th:

SO much talent there. Oh behind the scene’s we were amatuer hour. I still remember the board renewing Sheen’s contract and it sounded like they forgot about the football bit.

Man the Roosters are smart.
So you have 4 or more Talented Forwards. One called Matterson seems to be better then the others. Yet this kid seems to be more money focused… He gets an offer from the Tigers and is let go!

Hire on attitude. The Roosters have signed their opposite center when he was cheap. They will have a cheapie talent, yes not as good as Latrell but cheap and ready to go.

We only have MOM who may have played with him once. No connection… Let him go.

Suspect Newcastle will sign him somehow. They must be thankful they have a performance based contracts.

“The injury to Jacob Liddle has thrown the Tigers’ hooker plans intio disarray.
The injury to Jacob Liddle has thrown the Tigers’ hooker plans intio disarray.”

Just reading how mangled that sentence is… Shows how much disarray we are in.
Tigers though we got to hang tough.
Personally I see Reynolds as being a damn good center. But the big question is what kind of Hooker will Reynolds be?
He is big on defense in 5/8. Picked often because of that role.
His mentor will be Robbie Farah.
He is known to run the ball, also to be a ball hog.

Other then being a little more grubby, I think were seeing Farah Mk2 and not in a good way.

@happy_tiger Bingo~!

Now for all those talking pay cuts. Who is going to extend Reynolds contract to get him to sign the pay cut?
How about Packer? Give him an extra year, 5 at 500k instead of 4 at 600K? Anyone?

People like Lawrence will take a paycut. They will do this because they are club men and because they want to play out their time here. They also like playing with their friends, Packer now only has Mats.

So we can offer them out at 100k. Have Cronulla or the Storm buy them cheaply and go to the grand final. Do we like subsidizing their final’s trophies?

Or we could do a swap? No one is going to swap rocks for diamonds. We could possibly swap Packer for James Graham, but it would be a negative cash flow to us. Or we could offload Mattherson with Packer or McQueen! Get them off our books.

Truth is we have made an Omlette. We have signed their contracts, we cannot easily unsign them. Mistakes are easily made but expensively corrected.

@Elderslie_Tiger
People forget how desperate we were. We just had 3 of the big 4 walk after our entire team was geared around them. Reynolds was still a decent 5/8, solid defender and former blue. Do people remember we had next to no one signed when Cleary and co took over?

Everyone says punt Reynolds, fair enough. But we are saying this with Marshall rejoining our squad. Reynolds was the right call at the time and he just had way too many injuries. We could have made a long shot call for Maloney or Cronk, but we had Reynolds name on the contract.

It’s the Mbye signing that mystifies me.

Ok while we moan at the Roosters cap situation I have to do a C’mon.
Brett and Josh Morris were free agents, so we hire Mbye. We have seen both Morris’s perform at career best this year, Mbye has performed better then expected but… Still a lot of average for a very high price.

Then we make mr 750K captain.

Does anyone else wonder why we couldn’t hire DWZ? Why don’t we just hire Unkle Nick’s accountant. They seem to be able to recruit better then anyone else in league.

@Don_Kershane No no no.
Think differently.

Ok you are accused of roarting the cap. When suddenly you keep your two best juniors… If they kept Matterson and hired Brett Morris you would have everyone screaming.

People were not screaming because they shed some players. Heck they shed’d Pearce, SKD, Aiden Gurera (whatever his name is), etc. the year before. They also had great timing on those players, the guys they kept like Mitch Aubusson are still fighting fit (bar GF day, but they ticked on all year). I think the only player they could have passed on was Jake Friend.