Gleeson: Deal or No Deal...? : Thu Apr 02, 2009 10:47 am
The other thread is talking about will he/won't he go....I thought I'd start this thread about the would-it-be-beneficial-for-us side of the deal.
I've been looking through his stats on the SL website and they show he's been pretty consistent for us. In four seasons he's only missed a handful of games, and on offloads, tackle busts and clean breaks he has either been the top centre or at least in the top two or three in the league every season. Everyone regards his first season (when he got in the SL Dream Team) as his best and it was his best in terms of scoring tries but his assists, offloads, busts and breaks his peaks were in 2006-07. In terms of the stats he was definitely better for us as an individual than he was at Saints.
Those are however overall season figures and one thing I've felt for a while about Gleeson is that he tends to deal in a few big games and other times is relatively anonymous. In contrast to a lot of his England team-mates he plays above his club form at international level. I think he's got more to give than he shows for us a lot of the time and the right change of environment could bring another gear out of him.
The background to this I think is that he's a man disillusioned with how his career has gone, and he's paid a heavy price for betting on that Bradford game in 2004. When he first came through at Hudds when Mal Reilly was coach he was linked with us a couple of times, with us having his brother, the stumbling block was they wanted Roper in exchange if I remember! It was hard to judge him when Hudds got caned every week and at the time I thought he might be one of those 'prospects' who never amounts to anything, he had good feet but didn't look big enough.
When he went to Saints there was a lot of hype in the first half of his first season, Darren Albert was saying it was like playing outside Gidley again, he got fast tracked into the GB team. After that he seemed to drop off a bit for a while but the turning point was when he played that game for England 'A' against the Aussies in 2003 after being dropped from GB, he really got into them and looked the business, and when he came back for 2004 built like a tank and started carving up at the start of that season he looked like he was on the verge of something special. He tore us up the first time Saints came to the HJ when they put 50 on us and Albert got a hat-trick outside him. After that game I remember thinking this was good news for GB, he looked a cut ahead of the other British backs, he had better footwork and hands than anyone else and now he had the size to go with it, so when we signed him a couple of months later I thought this was a massive deal. He looked like he was on the verge of becoming someone in the league of Robinson, Newlove, Davies etc.
As things happened he ended up wasting his peak years, because he did become the best centre in the league over the next couple of seasons but playing at Warrington didn't have the significance that it would if he'd been at Saints still. I've brought up before on this forum the point about too many of our players having won trophies elsewhere, and not expecting to win anything else with us, and it not being a good mentality....Gleeson is likely to be more bitter than most because he won one SL and one CC early in his career and had a lot more trophies in him, but year by year he's realised that he's lost the peak of his career at a club where things weren't right. That betting saga cost him 3 CCs and another SL at Saints.
The last chance to achieve something significant is to go to the NRL like he's been talking about for the last year, if he went over and made a name for himself like Ellis is starting to do it would give him an achievement to cap his career - and if he played up to the top of his game he could make an impact over there. If he goes to Wigan its going to shut the door on that and it will run down the rest of his career. Once the initial excitement of a new environment is over he's going to find himself in the same position he was with us - Wigan are better than we are but they are still a good 3 years away from winning trophies, that will take him up till age 32 and probably time for his move to Salford or back to Hudds for a year before retiring.
I think it is right that we move him on, he doesn't look like he wants to be here and him wasting his career is a negative influence on the camp. I will think its a shame that he's gone, but actually more of a shame for him than for us because he has delivered a decent return for us. We wanted the best centre in the league and thats what he was.....we didn't deliver a return for him though and he lost interest a while ago.
