The real premiership window - 2027 onwards

[LeonardCohen]

You can complain as much as you want about the coach, Waddell and whoever else.

And you are probably right.

But it all comes back to the contracts of Tom, Jake and DCE - $3.5m or thereabouts, and we are getting a broken Tom, a checked out 37yo Chery and a plodding Jake.

So basically, nothing out of our top 3 paid players.

Until all of these contracts roll off at the end of 2025 (checked out Cherry) and 2026 (busted Turbos), the math says we are just making up the numbers.

This is a good take on things. I have no problem with paying 3 players an average of a million bucks; that’s not the problem, per se. It’s pretty normal. The problem is what you get in return for that investment.

When those deals were done, the return was pretty good, but circumstances have changed and we are no longer getting bang for our buck. The performances from the big three are not good enough to offset the lack of balance elsewhere; particularly in the forwards.

So, reduced deals for Tom and Jake, and Fog’s deal coming in cheaper than Chez, might allow us some wiggle room to build a better pack. We’ll see.