As Manly scramble to persuade Daly Cherry-Evans to stay at the club, the fact remains they had never tabled a formal offer for their longest-serving player until news broke on Monday that he had decided this season would be his last at Brookvale.
It was news to everyone else in rugby league, but not the Sea Eagles, who have known since December that the 36-year-old veteran was planning to leave at season’s end.
According to Cherry-Evans, Manly’s response late last year was “they weren’t going to offer anything unless another club offered anything”.
Then, on Monday, 20 minutes after the Herald and Nine broke the news of Cherry-Evans’ decision to quit the club, there was a change of heart.
The Sea Eagles contacted Fox Sports, where the panellists on their evening NRL 360 show were scrambling to react to the news, to say they would table a two-year offer for the veteran halfback.
It was left to NRL 360 host Braith Anasta, a rival player agent, to reveal the offer live on air. Cherry-Evans had not been informed in advance of the new deal that was being put forward.
Back against the wall … Daly Cherry-Evans.Credit: Steven Siewert
For several hours on Monday afternoon, Sea Eagles bosses had been aware their captain intended to reveal his decision later that night on Channel 9’s 100% Footy. Nine is the publisher of this masthead.
They’d had the time to contact the player or his agent to put forward a two-year deal that had not once been requested or discussed by the Cherry-Evans camp – despite a News Corp report suggesting otherwise.
Instead they went public with the offer on NRL 360. It looked to outsiders like a desperate attempt to save face, although Manly CEO Tony Mestrov denied that was the case at a press conference on Tuesday morning.
But what is certain is that Manly took the extraordinary step of tabling the offer through the NRL 360 show in an apparent effort to convince bewildered Sea Eagles fans that they were doing everything in their power to retain their star No.7.
The move also had the effect of turning the narrative against the Queensland halfback before he appeared on 100% Footy.
By making the offer so late in the day, Manly were making it clear that Cherry-Evans, not them, was driving the split after a 15-year relationship covering nine finals series, two grand finals and a premiership. “The ball is now in Daly’s court,” Mestrov repeatedly said at his press conference on Tuesday morning.
Cherry-Evans saw the offer as another slap in the face. Not that you would have known that by watching his interview, which he handled with the class and composure that have been his hallmarks throughout his decorated career, going out of his way to show respect to Manly even if it might not have not been reciprocated.
During the past few weeks, Cherry-Evans has sat back and listened while the media talked about his future. He read the News Corp reports that he was holding out for a two-year deal, which wasn’t forthcoming from Manly.
Daly Cherry-Evans won the 2011 premiership under Des Hasler in his first season with Manly.Credit: NRL Photos
He read, in the same publication, that he’d been offered a one-year deal worth $600,000 to stay.
But Cherry-Evans revealed on 100% Footy that there had never been a formal offer.
As he’d watched the story play out, Cherry-Evans had begun to wonder whether Manly were simply posturing to protect themselves from the inevitable fan backlash. He decided the charade needed to stop and on Monday started the process of telling those close to him at Manly he’d be leaving at the end of the season, and that he would use the pre-arranged appearance on 100% Footy as his platform to discuss the matter.
He pulled aside the Trbojevic brothers, Tom and Jake, at the club’s recovery session at Freshwater Beach to tell them the news. He also spoke to football manager Peter Gentle and coach Anthony Seibold about his intention to make public his decision to leave.
Then, at around 6.45pm, the rugby league world was thrown into chaos, as Fox Sports viewers tried to make sense of a seemingly nonsensical situation unfolding on live television.
The Daily Mail reported that because Cherry-Evans hadn’t invited Seibold to his wedding over the summer – an event attended by former coach Des Hasler – there was a feud between the pair. That is wide of the mark.
While Seibold and Cherry-Evans may not be the closest of mates, it wasn’t a contributing factor in Cherry-Evans’ decision to leave the club.
Mestrov had largely left Gentle to handle discussions with Cherry-Evans. Even in December, when Cherry-Evans met with the club to tell them that he was not going to play on at the Sea Eagles, the Manly CEO was not present.
On 100% Footy, when referring to the “clean and great discussions” he had with the club as recently as Monday, Cherry-Evans said the communication was with Gentle and Seibold.
This masthead spoke to Mestrov on Monday night and asked him why the club had waited until after the news had broken before tabling an offer.
He explained that he’d had lunch with Manly owner Scott Penn earlier that day, and the pair had been preparing to offer Cherry-Evans a two-year deal to try and change his mind.
That offer – for two years and $1.4 million – was formalised with Cherry-Evans’ management on Tuesday morning.
Only a week ago, this columnist contacted Mestrov after learning that the club had held an internal meeting at which it was decided they wanted Cherry-Evans to play on. At the time, we were unaware Manly had already been holding on to the best kept secret in the game for almost four months.
The Sea Eagles meeting came on the back of an impressive outing from the veteran playmaker in the first-round win over the Cowboys and in the same week as the value of quality halves was made abundantly clear by Dylan Brown’s $1.3 million, 10-year deal with Newcastle.
Suddenly, there was a willingness to delay the contingency plan – a positional switch that would have seen Tom Trbojevic move to five-eighth, Lehi Hopoate take his No.1 jersey and Luke Brooks move to halfback.
But the appetite to keep Cherry-Evans had not been there in October, which is why Cherry-Evans’ management tested the waters with rival clubs. The queue is getting longer by the minute with reports that the Dragons, Roosters and Dolphins are among the teams interested.
And that is the main reason Manly were so upset on Monday night. They were under the impression that if Cherry-Evans left Manly in 2026, it would be either to retire or head overseas. That’s why they were willing to offer him a coaching job post-footy. It’s a notion that has been strongly refuted.
Regardless of whether the Penn-Mestrov meeting on Monday was about to yield a formal pitch to change Cherry-Evans’ mind, the question has to be asked: Why did they even need to change his mind in the first place?
It’s almost 10 years to the day Cherry-Evans famously agreed to, and later reneged on, a rich deal with the Gold Coast Titans. Is another backflip on the cards? Don’t count on it.
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