Latest On Greg Bird

[exile in Tiger country]

If Wakefield made Bird a £100,000 offer and he turned it down then I would surmise his Bradford contract is worth £100,000 minimum per season.

If we had £100,000 + spare on the cap as the season started I would argue that is poor management. The £20,000 contingency we have seems better.

So how come we were interested at all? We didn't seriously offer him £20K did we?

I was really gutted when we did not sign Mat King but maybe that offers a lesson because hindsight says he was not the earth shattering capture many of us thought.

Well hindsight is a wonderful thing and you can't dismiss every failed signing based on the chance they may turn out to be crap!

It would be churlish to dent that Greg Bird is not a good player BUT I personally do not rate him overly highly.

That is fair enough but my main concern is not that we have not signed Bird specifically but we have not signed a truly class player in any position. Do we have a player with that something special who will be the difference in some games? It is as if we are already hoping S Tomkins will be the man.

GeoffN suggested the money has gone on improved contracts for some players and while some young players have improved deals IMO that isn't strictly true to say its all gone that way (if that is what he meant).

We have three players in Phelps, Riddell and Roberts who will have taken a good chunk of our available spend and two of those, Phelps and Roberts who we really didn't need IMO compared to addressing weaknesses elsewhere. I also doubt Riddell has come over for less than Higham.

The biggest mystery is why we gave Phelps a deal given the young players on the books and it seems with Roberts we got him a year early due to his Aussie club needing to offload his wage. Why did we do this? We were not planning on him coming until 2010 so what the club has ended up doing is taking an unexpected hit into 2009's salary cap needlessly.

That will have reduced our ability to sign other players.
Is Roberts such a class player that was worth doing given everyone including IL says we need another prop?

Our recruitment in the off season looks haphazard and event driven rather than planned.

Dave

I haven't seen Roberts play, so wouldn't like to comment on his ability however we definitely needed to sign a winger to replace Calderwood, and with his try scoring rae in the NRL Roberts looks on paper to be a good signing.

[slimshady]

Maybe we have more than £20,000 available Dave. One of my sources believes we do.

I was told that Nobby had done a load of work in trying to sign Bird and I dont think the money was the problem, it was more like being unable to unload someone from the overseas quota. Bird wanted to come and both him and Nobby are gutted that it was unacheiveable.

[Paleaaesina_Da_Beast]

bulls