Parramatta Eels: Thanks for wasting my life as a footy fan and how about some compensation
DEAR Parramatta Eels,
First, a belated memo to the board and management. When Kieran Foran’s agent requested that an exit clause related to political infighting be put in his Eels contract, THAT WASN’T MEANT TO BE A CHALLENGE.
Yet like clockwork, football management apocalypse on an unprecedented scale, which is really saying something when it comes to Parra. Seriously - to turn the superstar’s political infighting clause into the catalyst for political infighting, thus turning away said superstar. No other club would ever have been capable of such utterly masterful self-destruction - and that’s without even going into the fact TWO versions of the Foran contract existed...
Which leads me to the primary point of this correspondence.
I’d like to herby lodge my formal interest in receiving damages from the Eels club. Seeing Parramatta is currently in the business of stupefying payouts, see how this one grabs you: I’d like compensation for wasting 30-odd years of my life being an Eels fan. If Foran is worth a million dollars in damages having never even felt the unique pain of pulling on a blue and gold jersey, you must at least owe me a lifetime supply of Tingha Palace salt and pepper squid at Parra Leagues by now.
I was three years old when Ray Price and Mick Cronin said farewell in glory with the club’s last premiership, way back in 1986. I have no clear memories of Parramatta being great - only fleetingly decent and often dismal, during a 29-year drought amid which 11 other clubs have won premierships.
My first-ever game was sitting on the old wooden benches at Kogarah watching a lamentable Eels outfit get trounced by the Dragons. The dire years of the early to mid 90s, when Sterling and Kenny hung the boots up and Jason Bell and Glen Liddiard followed, made my young self suspect I may have backed a loser.
Then came the upswing from the Bulldogs Super League poaching, a buzz brought to an abrupt and nasty end by the Paul Carige incident of 1998.
Soon followed the most Parra season of them all, 2001, a record-breaking year that made blue and gold hearts whole again... then smashed them to smithereens in a no-contest grand final that Andrew Johns and Ben Kennedy gleefully ended by half-time, before revealing they knew the game was over days before when Brian Smith fronted a deathly-scared side for the GF breakfast.
Inconsistent competence with the expectation of ultimate failure typified the 2000s, a decade where only almighty admiration for Nathan Hindmarsh keep your Parra heart beating, culminating in 2009.
What a season - Jarryd Hayne played footy the like of which I’ve never seen before, before a rorting Storm team burgled the trophy to set off another round of heartache. Watching Hindy cry after that defeat brutally summed up the perpetual emotion of all Eels fans aged 30 and under.
Since then... well, what a horrible joke. The Ricky Stuart disaster. The Chris Sandow contract. The (blameless) exit of great white hope Hayne. Now, this utterly embarrassing and downright humiliating farce with Foran, an outstanding and honourable player who clearly wonders what the hell this club is really about.
The Eels’ recruitment track record is nothing short of diabolical. A colleague asked me this week to name the best non-local signing the club had made in the past decade. I was completely stumped, eventually settling with little enthusiasm on Timana Tahu. For every Tahu, there’s been loads of Carl Webbs, Paul Whatuiras and Justin Poores.
Even the big-name signings (from Poore to a returning Willie Tonga and now Anthony Watmough) have mostly become worse players for having joined the Eels, another thing that may be keeping Foran up at night. Will Hopoate has performed admirably since returning to the NRL in blue and gold, yet certainly not following the stratospheric trajectory he was on at Manly.
Then there’s the fact Parramatta, a club that should be an NRL powerhouse and a side players want to join, has become a joint dependent on paying overs to sign talent. The lack of on-field success, inability to keep the right junior talent and the management volatility has made it so. The Sandow deal was openly mocked by South Sydney, Hopoate is getting top-end elite money, ageing and battered Watmough is getting a fat cheque - even the Foran deal had to blow others out of the water to get over the line and is probably excessive, as fine a player as he is.
There’s so many people to blame. Blaming Denis Fitzgerald became everyone’s default mode after years on end of mediocrity, only for the mob who ousted him to prove themselves worse. The most galling thing is the fact that the club routinely trashes a very basic edict from our first premiership coach, the late, great Jack Gibson: “Winning starts in the front office.”
The Eels front office has given the team little chance of success. A flow-on from the front office to the football department, the bizarre structure where coach Brad Arthur reports to former (sacked) coach turned general manager of football Daniel Anderson, has reportedly descended into a civil war that promises to overshadow the back half of what has been another disappointing season. It will also give Foran, who rates Arthur highly, another reason to rethink his position.
You can only feel sorry for the players, often the ones trotted out to explain the inexplicable. Captain Tim Mannah, a wholehearted player and one of the NRL’s finest citizens, deserves a medal (in the very likely absence of a premiership ring).
And you have to feel sorry for the fans. Hell, I feel sorry for myself, even though I’ll continue to foolishly count myself an Eels fan for life. So how about that payout for the past 30 years of pointless heartache, Parra?
Tim Elbra is Fox Sports Australia Homepage Editor and a long-suffering Eels fan.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sp...ome-compensation/story-fnp0lyn3-1227412504767
DEAR Parramatta Eels,
First, a belated memo to the board and management. When Kieran Foran’s agent requested that an exit clause related to political infighting be put in his Eels contract, THAT WASN’T MEANT TO BE A CHALLENGE.
Yet like clockwork, football management apocalypse on an unprecedented scale, which is really saying something when it comes to Parra. Seriously - to turn the superstar’s political infighting clause into the catalyst for political infighting, thus turning away said superstar. No other club would ever have been capable of such utterly masterful self-destruction - and that’s without even going into the fact TWO versions of the Foran contract existed...
Which leads me to the primary point of this correspondence.
I’d like to herby lodge my formal interest in receiving damages from the Eels club. Seeing Parramatta is currently in the business of stupefying payouts, see how this one grabs you: I’d like compensation for wasting 30-odd years of my life being an Eels fan. If Foran is worth a million dollars in damages having never even felt the unique pain of pulling on a blue and gold jersey, you must at least owe me a lifetime supply of Tingha Palace salt and pepper squid at Parra Leagues by now.
I was three years old when Ray Price and Mick Cronin said farewell in glory with the club’s last premiership, way back in 1986. I have no clear memories of Parramatta being great - only fleetingly decent and often dismal, during a 29-year drought amid which 11 other clubs have won premierships.
My first-ever game was sitting on the old wooden benches at Kogarah watching a lamentable Eels outfit get trounced by the Dragons. The dire years of the early to mid 90s, when Sterling and Kenny hung the boots up and Jason Bell and Glen Liddiard followed, made my young self suspect I may have backed a loser.
Then came the upswing from the Bulldogs Super League poaching, a buzz brought to an abrupt and nasty end by the Paul Carige incident of 1998.
Soon followed the most Parra season of them all, 2001, a record-breaking year that made blue and gold hearts whole again... then smashed them to smithereens in a no-contest grand final that Andrew Johns and Ben Kennedy gleefully ended by half-time, before revealing they knew the game was over days before when Brian Smith fronted a deathly-scared side for the GF breakfast.
Inconsistent competence with the expectation of ultimate failure typified the 2000s, a decade where only almighty admiration for Nathan Hindmarsh keep your Parra heart beating, culminating in 2009.
What a season - Jarryd Hayne played footy the like of which I’ve never seen before, before a rorting Storm team burgled the trophy to set off another round of heartache. Watching Hindy cry after that defeat brutally summed up the perpetual emotion of all Eels fans aged 30 and under.
Since then... well, what a horrible joke. The Ricky Stuart disaster. The Chris Sandow contract. The (blameless) exit of great white hope Hayne. Now, this utterly embarrassing and downright humiliating farce with Foran, an outstanding and honourable player who clearly wonders what the hell this club is really about.
The Eels’ recruitment track record is nothing short of diabolical. A colleague asked me this week to name the best non-local signing the club had made in the past decade. I was completely stumped, eventually settling with little enthusiasm on Timana Tahu. For every Tahu, there’s been loads of Carl Webbs, Paul Whatuiras and Justin Poores.
Even the big-name signings (from Poore to a returning Willie Tonga and now Anthony Watmough) have mostly become worse players for having joined the Eels, another thing that may be keeping Foran up at night. Will Hopoate has performed admirably since returning to the NRL in blue and gold, yet certainly not following the stratospheric trajectory he was on at Manly.
Then there’s the fact Parramatta, a club that should be an NRL powerhouse and a side players want to join, has become a joint dependent on paying overs to sign talent. The lack of on-field success, inability to keep the right junior talent and the management volatility has made it so. The Sandow deal was openly mocked by South Sydney, Hopoate is getting top-end elite money, ageing and battered Watmough is getting a fat cheque - even the Foran deal had to blow others out of the water to get over the line and is probably excessive, as fine a player as he is.
There’s so many people to blame. Blaming Denis Fitzgerald became everyone’s default mode after years on end of mediocrity, only for the mob who ousted him to prove themselves worse. The most galling thing is the fact that the club routinely trashes a very basic edict from our first premiership coach, the late, great Jack Gibson: “Winning starts in the front office.”
The Eels front office has given the team little chance of success. A flow-on from the front office to the football department, the bizarre structure where coach Brad Arthur reports to former (sacked) coach turned general manager of football Daniel Anderson, has reportedly descended into a civil war that promises to overshadow the back half of what has been another disappointing season. It will also give Foran, who rates Arthur highly, another reason to rethink his position.
You can only feel sorry for the players, often the ones trotted out to explain the inexplicable. Captain Tim Mannah, a wholehearted player and one of the NRL’s finest citizens, deserves a medal (in the very likely absence of a premiership ring).
And you have to feel sorry for the fans. Hell, I feel sorry for myself, even though I’ll continue to foolishly count myself an Eels fan for life. So how about that payout for the past 30 years of pointless heartache, Parra?
Tim Elbra is Fox Sports Australia Homepage Editor and a long-suffering Eels fan.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sp...ome-compensation/story-fnp0lyn3-1227412504767