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Almost a year to the day after Greg Inglis announced he would be taking his talents to South Sydney, speculation continues to swirl that his time in Cardinal and Myrtle will last as long as the three year contract he signed, before he returns to the club which found and developed him in to the world’s best centre – the Melbourne Storm.
However, as anyone who has ever been through a messy break up knows, Inglis won’t go crawling back to his first love. He himself may have hinted he will but time, a bit of reflection and the realization of a few home truths will see Inglis finish his career at a club – not necessarily Souths – on Albury’s side of the Murray River.
It was teenage romance when Inglis met the Storm – he signed his first contract with Melbourne at the tender age of fifteen. Over the coming years Inglis grew in to a monster of a man with the most famous fend in the game and speed that led Gus Gould to refer to him as the “Rolls Royce”.
It seemed like a match made in heaven but just as money problems are the leading cause for divorce, it was to be money issues that drove a wedge between Inglis and his beloved Storm.
The 2010 salary cap scandal exposed the Melbourne Storm’s systemic cheating of the salary cap over four years, costing them two premierships, minor premierships and the indignity of having to play the 2010 season for no points.
However the real cost for the Storm was the sheer number of players they then had to shed to come in under the salary cap for 2011. Talent the likes of Brett White, Brett Finch and Ryan Hoffman went but it wasn’t enough. One of the Storm’s “Big Four” – Inglis, Cam Smith, Billy Slater and Cooper Cronk – had to go too.
Initially Inglis was defiant on his prospects of leaving, saying in April 2010, “I’m not going anywhere… I really love the place. It is like family to me and I have no intention of leaving.”
However, by the end of the 2010 season Inglis was singing a different tune and he was released from the final year of his contract with the Storm to take up a two year deal with the Brisbane Broncos in an ill-fated move that would soon be recognized for what it was – the Broncos being Inglis’s rebound club.
It was suggested at the time that it was Inglis who looked to secure the release from the Storm and received it on compassionate grounds due to his then-fiancée Sally Robinson living in Brisbane.
But Inglis failing to take up his contract with the Broncos and instead moving to Souths somewhat flies in the face of the whole “compassionate” grounds for a release.
Adding to this is the fact that Inglis’s move to the Broncos was going to be subsidised by the Storm by $40,000 a year to ensure he didn’t take a pay cut to leave Melbourne. No sporting organization in the world gives a player a release on compassionate grounds and then top up that player’s contract at a rival club. They already did him a favour letting him go and you don’t need Brian Waldron to tell you that you don’t pay people for doing them a favour.
The reality, one might conclude, was a little more along the lines of Melbourne realizing they needed to shed around $600,000 from their roster to make it in under the salary cap for 2011 and any one of the “big four’s” contracts would be just the right amount.
It would have been a hell of a situation for the bigwigs at Melbourne to be in – which of the “big four” do you let go? Unfortunately for Inglis he was the one tapped on the shoulder but they at least allowed him to look as though he jumped rather than was pushed.
And that’s the rub. Even though Inglis was allowed to leave with a degree of grace and he still holds his former coach and teammates in the highest regard, at the end of the day the Melbourne Storm decided he was expendable – or at least expendable compared to Cronk, Smith and Slater.
So when he played his last game for Melbourne in 2010 it was followed by declarations of undying love, of this just being “a break” and that he would be welcomed back with open arms in a couple of years when finances weren’t as complicated.
However, as the months passed, Inglis had time to realize he had been lied to. Melbourne may have said it was them and not him but as long as they still had the other three of the “big four” Inglis was faced with the harsh reality of what had happened.
He had been dumped.
He showed all the classic symptoms – well documented weight gain, squabbling with the Storm over unpaid money, the poorly thought-out fling with a hotter (temperature wise) club that was never going to last and finally acceptance with a new club that seems a good fit.
Accordingly, over the last twelve months, Inglis’s forecasts about his future have slowly moved away from the defiant “definitely moving back to Melbourne”, to the once-bitten twice-shy response that he gave this week.
“I have actually settled in quite well [at Souths] and I am loving it at the moment, so you never know. I have got two years there but it might be beyond that.
“I am at a good club now, a very proud and very traditional club and I am happy with where I am now.”
We’re happy for you too, Greg. And you look great.
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