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Trouble is, there doesn’t seem to be anyone home at NRL headquarters who can help them.
When Fox Sports broke the story on January 29 about the Tigers and Melbourne negotiating a unique player exchange for 12 months with Grant and Momirovski, even the NRL’s official website trumpeted the arrangement.
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It all looked set to be green lit, rubber-stamped, deal done. Until the Melbourne Storm lodged their paperwork.
Under the terms of the agreement, the Storm will pick up the rest of Momirovski’s wage this season and the Tigers will do the same for Grant.
The problem? The Storm have been told they incorrectly crunched their numbers on Momirovski and they’ve come up $16,000 short.
Since then, the Storm and the Tigers have come up with a variety of different suggestions to try and find enough bend at NRL headquarters to make the deal happen.
The response? Crickets. Cooooeeeee. Is anyone home? Seriously.
The first sign of red flags was February 6 when Storm coach Craig Bellamy mentioned “road blocks”.
“I’m not quite sure where that is at the moment. It seemed to be a simple thing to me,” Bellamy said.
“The two clubs were very happy for it to happen. The two players were very happy for it to happen for 12 months. But there’s been a fair few roadblocks put up by the NRL.”
This was well after Momirovski had made the trip to Melbourne to visit the Storm headquarters and Grant had done the same in Sydney with the Tigers at Concord.
Last week both clubs were told they would have an answer by early in the week. It got to Wednesday when all the teams were travelling to Perth for the Nines and they were told Friday.
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Then the real doozy, drum roll please, they were told they’d have an answer by 5pm on Monday.
As of 5.20pm Monday night, no one was any the wiser.
The NRL claims says the Integrity Unit was in touch with Melbourne late Monday and have advised as it sits at the moment, the deal can’t go through.
Is the NRL serious? Come on, we’re talking about a unique arrangement here which would be immensely beneficial for both clubs and the game of rugby league.
Surely there’s more than one way to skin this cat? We’re not talking $600,000 or $160,000 – we’re talking $16,000.
Considering each of the 16 NRL clubs has $9.8 million to spend on their NRL roster of top 30 players this season, it’s not exactly big biscuits.
Yes, the salary cap is the salary cap and of course it needs to be policed and meet the correct checks and balances.
But surely we can find someone at NRL headquarters with the common sense to figure out a way to make this deal happen.