SaintsFan wrote:
Not necessarily. I groan at the thought of having Meli causing disasters in defence for two bloody years (one year would have been bad enough) but we can't dispose of all of our experienced players in one shot. Flannery getting one is sufficient given that next season another batch of players come to the end of their contracts, arguably our best batch of players. Wello getting two years is fine by me as he has been superb this season and his effectiveness is not undermined by his lack of pace, assuming he maintains his form.
To give the club the benefit of the doubt, what they might be thinking of is blending in more young players over the next season or two because our new coach is well known apparently for working with young players and so this might just be the club trying to manage what are significant manpower changes over the next couple of seasons. That's just a guess though.
Wello's overall form this year has been very good i think, but he's 30 now, so I'm suprised both he and Meli got more than the standard 1 year given the clubs recent track record.
Meli, despite his floor is still a genuinely dangerous player (for both teams on the pitch
) which is something we don't have an awful lot of.
Flannery, as I say, good player in his own right.
I don't dispute any of them resigning as individuals and I'd share your concern if they were all to leave at once, but the collective resigning of all 3 and the length of Wellens and Meli's contract does suprise me slighly.
I know we don't know how much they've been offered, but I reckon all three (especially Wello) would have attracted attention from other clubs (especially Bradford andSalford, who seem to be working hard on recruitment), which leads me to beleive that they won't be exactly on peanuts.
I guess, as I speccy, hope skews your veiw. Many of us hope that Lomax will develop this year into a dangerous successor to Wello, hope that Wheeler can get an injury free run into the centres, hope that Frodsham can finally come out the shadows and develop into a SL player and would hope that we could have attracted a classy centre from the NRL instead of resigning a pretty good utlity player in Flannery. The problem the board have is making things work in the real world, I suppose.
