If's

[TagMonster]

Hindsight is 20/20.

Let me put this to you, Foz and DCE are honest people, so the club clears space for them by letting Choc and Gift go. Signs DCE to big money as he stated he wanted to set his family up. Then we sign Foz to a moderate deal as he wanted the best coaching, which we have in Johns.

Is anybody calling for the Administrations blood? Probably not.

Now, if we decided to not believe them. We keep Gift and Choc on big money who have 2 years left at best. Then news comes out about Manly being unable to sign DCE and Foz as we can't fit them under the cap. I would suggest Choc throws his toys out of the cot because the club isn't resigning the best halves that lead us to a premiership. Fans will be pissed. We have no cap space and are in the same position we are now. The board will be blamed bla bla bla.

Third option is what has unfolded. The board took two players on face value and thought they could resign them. Evidently they couldn't but at least we are in a position salary cap wise to rebuild. Of the three broad outcomes that could have occurred, yes we didn't get the best, but at least we are in a position to rebuild moving forward.

At the end of the day, Foz is a liar. He was never staying. DCE would have resigned if the NRL didn't take over the Titans. Who saw that coming 12 months ago? Some things are outside the boards control.

This was a Swiss Cheese Situation, the holes lined up just right so everything fell threw.

 

[Snake]

I know this is hindsight...but

I would have liked the club to forget about DCE, keep Gifty, and re-sign Foran.

At the time, DCE was all the rage, and the club made him a priority. I have always thought he was a good half, but not good enough to show a club legend the door. We should have had faith in our ability to bring through another good player into the 7; it's happened before, it'll happen again. Instead, now we have to find a heap of good players instead of just one.

The decision to let Gifty go was dumb, and I thought it was at the time too.

 

[TagMonster]

Hindsight also provides facts we didn't know at the time. If we keep Gifty, which I still would have loved, we would still have Choc. Is he worth the 900k or there abouts we were paying him? Also, would you have kept Foz for 1.2mil? Yes the club would have kept all its legends. But at what cost to the club?

The key issue that has us in the position we are in is that Dollar Des backloaded all those big contracts, some of which he restructured on his way out in an attempt to poach our players. That's what has us in a hole. Everyone thinks if he came back he would solve all our problem including conflict in the middle east! He would give us temporary success by backloading contracts, only to run away again for bigger dollars.

 

[Ron E. Gibbs]

It's too late to look backwards - time to look ahead. Two players who didn't want to be here are going. We can ask why they didn't want to be here and speculate all we like, but really, if they didn't want to stay, there's nothing anybody could do about it. Time to rally round Tooves and get excited about the future.

 

[sheridanstand78]

They have both decided to turn their backs on the club for their own reasons. I hope we can just draw a line under it as a club, learn from the obvious mistakes and plan our future wisely.

These 2 had all off season to sort this out and they made their decisions giving the club no time to prepare for alternatives for this season in the event that they left.

I know its a business but I do feel left down by both of them as this club gave them the opportunity to become what they have become!

 

[TagMonster]

I agree that the past is the past and that one of the positives is I don't have to see Drop-mough killing momentum anymore. I'm just sick of the current board being made scap goats. They were forced into a number of decisions that were going to end badly due in part to the old administrations poor planning. Now that its all said and done I will judge them on what they do from here. All decisions from here on out are on them. They have more than enough salary cap space to sign our juniors long term and impact player in key positions. They have the coach and staff to get them there. Promote from within, it's the Manly way and should be maintained.