Manly Sea Eagles senior players Jake and Tom Trbojevic and Daly Cherry-Evans were spotted at a clear-the-air meeting at Oceans Café in Narrabeen on Wednesday as the northern beaches club tries to unite.
There’s clearly been a sledge hammer taken to the Manly playing group in the wake of the Pride Jersey fallout and the Sea Eagles three most senior players have taken it upon themselves to try and mend some bridges.
They might not always see eye-to-eye but they’re all professional enough to try and always put the club first.
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The politics going on at Manly at the moment is possibly running as deep as it has in the history of the club and that is saying something considering all of the in-fighting that has often erupted at the Sea Eagles dating back to 1947.
From the late Bob Fulton’s fallout with Paul “Fatty” Vautin to the board rooms wars of the mid-2000s when Max Delmege owned the club – what’s going on at Manly at the moment might just surpass all of it.
And depending on who you talk to, it’s all as clear as mud.
What is certain is chairman and owner Scott Penn is losing fans by the minute on the northern peninsula.
The way Penn tries to pontificate about running the Sea Eagles while primarily residing in New York has worn out its use-by date.
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While Penn swans around in the US for most of the season, coach Des Hasler is left to try and be chairman, CEO and head coach and now somehow his position is under threat?
Confused? You’re not the only ones.
The supposed rift between Hasler and the Fulton family all centres around the recruitment strategies at the club.
The Fulton family have been huge supporters of young gun Josh Schuster while Hasler was keen to retain the experience and guile of Kieran Foran.
Foran was named Players Player at the Sea Eagles awards night last Monday – a fair indication of the regard the rest of the Sea Eagles playing group holds the champion playmaker in.
Foran is off to the Gold Coast from now on while Schuster will get first shot at wearing the Manly no.6 jumper he’s coveted for some time.
In the meantime new Manly CEO Tony Mestrov has walked into a Mexican standoff and is now tasked with trying to broker peace and figure out the best direction forward for the warring club.
Good luck. Mestrov is a good man but he’s going to need it.
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If all of this sounds familiar it’s because the Sea Eagles have been around this rodeo not so long ago when Hasler left to join Canterbury-Bankstown in 2012, Foran left to join Parramatta at the end of 2015 and DCE backflipped on joining the Gold Coast in 2016.
That led to DCE’s eight-year, $10 million contract to remain at the Sea Eagles, which ironically finishes as of October 31 this year.
The Manly skipper, 33, inked a further two-year extension back in April keeping him in the maroon and white until at least the end of 2025.
Whether Hasler will still be coach is all to be thrashed out on Thursday.
One thing for certain at the Sea Eagles, the more things change the more they stay the same.
A PRIVATE consortium of overseas business types have tabled Manly owner Scott Penn a $20 million offer to buy the Sea Eagles.
As the Sea Eagles reel from one out-of-control fire to the next, the offer has been on the table for the past month.
Penn is privately saying the club is not for sale but there are plenty of people on the northern beaches who think it might actually be the best thing for Manly.
A fresh start and try and make a clean break from the deep-seated politics that has been entrenched at the club for decades.
Penn has flipped and flopped in terms of his position on coach Des Hasler over the course of the few months.
In the midst of the Pride Jersey debate the Sea Eagles majority owner was quoted saying “Des is here as long as he wants to be here.”
That’s taken a very sharp hair pin turn over the course of the last fortnight.
For the record, any push to remove Hasler from Manly seems outrageous.
If anyone understands the fabric of the Sea Eagles, it’s the coach who guided them to their two most recent premierships.
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JUST SO ‘RIDICULOUS’
Ah, rugby league. The game that never, ever sleeps.
Only a couple of weeks back we reported the Wests Tigers were dreaming big and intending to make a Hail Mary play to sign the NRL’s best player in Cameron Munster.
The way we’d heard it the Tigers were talking about making a five-year circuit-breaker deal aimed at completely transforming the wooden spoon club.
For the Tigers to be any hope of getting anywhere near signing Munster they were talking $1.5 million per season as a starting point.
Which would make it a $7 million deal.
When the story launched into orbit the usual Tim Sheens mouthpiece immediately shot itself out of a cannon to try and hose the whole thing down.
“It’s ridiculous. We haven’t spoken to Munster or his manager and don’t intend to,” the Tigers director of football said on August 25.
Fast forward two weeks and the Melbourne Storm superstar Munster is now being openly quoted in The Daily Telegraph about how Benji Marshall has been text messaging him about the possibility of joining the Tigers.
Ah, rugby league. The greatest game of all.
