Scorpio
Armchair Expert
I would like to know... If you were in the position of our administration at the time, what would you have done?
I just want to say that I get a little annoyed that people still refer to this decision alone as a catalyst of Manly's downfall.
In 2014, largely due to the previously signed back-ended contracts, we:
- Had already offloaded Brent Kite
- Were paying a lot of money for aging players B.Stewart, G.Stewart, A.Watmough, J.Lyon S.Matai, as well as K.Foran and D.Cherry-Evans,
- Had to have some money to afford future recruits
- Had to have some money to upgrade contracts of players like DCE and Foran.
Now, as we know the club did not re-sign Glenn Stewart and a lot of average team performances seemed to follow that, including many disinterested looking performances of several of our players.
Without knowing the specific contract details or what was said behind closed doors, I'm not sure much else could have been done. A lot of the other players above were still under contract. If the club had tried to farm out Watmough (this was before his "I hate Manly" interview), Lyon, Matai, or Brett Stewart there would have been just as much outrage.
If we had no salary cap and no back-ended contracts, then we would have re-signed Glenn Stewart. Unfortunately we have neither of those things and we had to make a hard decision. In some ways we are still paying the price of this.
Thoughts?
I just want to say that I get a little annoyed that people still refer to this decision alone as a catalyst of Manly's downfall.
In 2014, largely due to the previously signed back-ended contracts, we:
- Had already offloaded Brent Kite
- Were paying a lot of money for aging players B.Stewart, G.Stewart, A.Watmough, J.Lyon S.Matai, as well as K.Foran and D.Cherry-Evans,
- Had to have some money to afford future recruits
- Had to have some money to upgrade contracts of players like DCE and Foran.
Now, as we know the club did not re-sign Glenn Stewart and a lot of average team performances seemed to follow that, including many disinterested looking performances of several of our players.
Without knowing the specific contract details or what was said behind closed doors, I'm not sure much else could have been done. A lot of the other players above were still under contract. If the club had tried to farm out Watmough (this was before his "I hate Manly" interview), Lyon, Matai, or Brett Stewart there would have been just as much outrage.
If we had no salary cap and no back-ended contracts, then we would have re-signed Glenn Stewart. Unfortunately we have neither of those things and we had to make a hard decision. In some ways we are still paying the price of this.
Thoughts?