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Dithering NRL needs a player transfer window, now

17th February, 2015
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Manly begin their 2016 season facing the Bulldogs. (AAP Image/Action Photographics, Grant Trouville)
Expert
17th February, 2015
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Let’s just say I am a young Manly Sea Eagles fan getting seriously excited about my team as it fine-tunes preparations for season 2015.

I am a 10-year-old and my favourite Eagles’ player is Daly Cherry-Evans and yes, my grand-parents knew it and gave me a Manly jumper for Christmas with the star’s name emblazoned across the back.

It is clearly my most prized possession. I cannot wait to wear it to footy training and be alongside my mates who proudly sprout Kieran Foran’s six and Jamie Lyons’ four as they go about their business.

But, no. I looked in the newspaper and reeled away in horror.

My beloved ‘Cherry’ had a day off from training and was spotted up on the Gold Coast, checking the Titans’ infrastructure with a view to signing a million-dollar contract for 2016 and beyond.

I shed more than a few tears. Dad says this is just the way it is. My grandfather, however, is a little more forthright: “Bloody mercenaries. These bludgers know nothing about loyalty, how can they expect the players of tomorrow to invest anything in them by way of loyalty?”

“Don’t worry young fella. Plenty more where they come from. If he wants to go, he’s not a real Manly man, probably never was…”

But what about me? I am left with the Manly jumper with Cherry-Evan’s monicker all over it. A Christmas present that was worth the world to me on December 25 but a few weeks later is bordering on worthless.

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I hear through the media that my main man is odds-on (whatever that means) to accept the huge money on offer from the Titans. I am confused, heartbroken. And there is a rising anger that my hero, my favourite Sea Eagle, doesn’t want to be in the maroon and white after the coming season.

He wants to play somewhere else for a team that ‘needs his organisational ability, youth and… blah, blah, blah’.

This week we have read and heard many reports of Cherry- Evans taking a day off from Manly training to fly north and check out Gold Coast’s living and training set-up. Such ‘news’ was broken just three weeks out from the premiership kick-off and it can do nothing but harm to the Manly club and its supporters, old and young.

I appreciate just about every man and his bulldog knows that Cherry Evans and his talented halves partner Kieran Foran will be free agents at the end of 2015 but why court one or the other at this time of the year?

Couldn’t something have been done in the summer months in secret? Is there some way the young Manly half could have checked out the Titans under a cloak of anonymity? We are less than a month from the premiership kick-off, was this some manager merely flexing his muscle and flaunting his stable’s prime footballing beef?

I think the Cherry-Evans scenario, although nothing new, stinks to high heaven. There was nothing illegal about his visit to Titans territory but I feel the timing is terribly awry. Manly folk are supposed to be getting enthused and excited about the coming season and what do they get? Pretty much a kick in the head.

I feel that stories such as Cherry-Evans talking in earnest to Titans’ coach Neil Henry just before the 2015 kickoff is devisive to Manly as a club, and potentially soul-destroying to the club’s army of supporters.

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This is yet another reason why the NRL needs a transfer window, six to ten weeks into the season, when players coming off contract are at liberty to shop themselves to the most attractive or highest bidder.

The NRL and its paper tiger Players Association has publicly stated that such a window is under serious discussion. I cannot understand why the concept is still a talking point, and not reality.

I believe rugby league needs the introduction of a transfer window in the coming season.
The fans need to know what is happening as much as the players and their money-hungry managers.

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