nice deal for the bulls, if he's good we can extend the deal, if not then it's only 2 months of wages we've spent on him.

nice work.

But is he with the increasing amount of games he is missing every season. He's only good value if fit and contributing and he hasn't been either of those so far this season.

Good bit of work by the club this IMO.

A player of proven SL quality who is available, willing to come to Odsal for the right price and can cover both the areas we are currently weakest, who is also willing to sign a short term deal so we don't open ourselves to any long term issues (in case the player doesn't fit in, we want to spend the cap money elsewhere, we want to bring through academy products etc), and the player can try to prove himself to earn a longer deal...excellent all round if you ask me, just a shame he's not over in time for tonight.

Are we heading towards shorter contracts across the board in general?

Discuss.

This has been completely misunderstood.

The idea of Deacon being good value is that, were we to get rid of him, he wouldnt only leave space for a half back but he'd leave a hell of a lot of room on the Salary Cap. Its all irrelevant like cos Macca is never going to get rid ever.

The general idea of signing people for less than season long contracts doesnt really appeal to me. The Rinaldi may well be in a similar light to the Tadulala contract issues last year in which he wanted to prove himself to the club in order to get a bigger wage.

I cannot understand why we havent resigned Morro, unless he doesnt want to sign again. Also, would anybody object to Beaver playing another season or 2 on this form? Other than perhaps Mrs Beaver. I'd love to see Menzies resign too.

By that i didnt mean them as two players. Just hammering in my point.

I dont know about accross the board, but I think we wil see more and more of these type of deals as clubs learn how to mange the cap money with the "live" monitoring, it builds in some flexibility that can be missing when spending up to the full cap in the off season recruitment drive. And also we could see contract length fall more in line with the licence period (if it hasn't already), especially for clubs who are not in the A or B licence brackets.

I'm pretty certain most contracts are super league contracts and become void should the club not get a licence. You'd really want to sign players over decent length contracts if you're thinking of them the core of your side and not find you've got half your squad out of contract at the same time.

Not a long term solution to our problems, but I expect he will come in do a decent job for us. We desperately needed cover for 6/7/9 and we have a player who is experienced and proven at SL. Hope we're working hard to secure some longer term quality signings though.

I can certainly see some benefits to 1/2 year contracts for everyone. Prove your worth, review the needs of the squad year to year more easily.

But on the flip side it gives instability to players and clubs alike and would result in much more player movement IMO.

I do feel longer term deals are thrown out too easily though. Certainly for players who (from the outside) need to prove themselves!

Platt?

I wasn't naming names, but yes, he'd be one.

And could we also be thinking of one certain Scrum Half and a coach with big fish lips?

seems a decent short term solution to the problems at 6/7/9 with advantage that we dont need to wait 6-8 weeks for him to get a visa. One sneaky thought that I had was maybe we've already identified and signed a longer term target and arent announcing it till visa issues are resolved and rinaldi is a stopgap till whoever it is arrives