Luke Leaves

We’ve seen this before. Fifteen years ago Saints’ prolific academy produced a prop forward who had become one of the best in the world by the time he left the club in 2011. James Graham went on to carve out a reputation as one of the most feared front rowers in the NRL. That reputation is still strong enough for St George-Illawarra to be leaning heavily on Graham even as he slows down having passed his 34th birthday before the end of the 2019 season.

Now, that career path looks set to be followed by Luke Thompson. It was announced today that the 24-year-old Saints academy graduate will leave his home town club at the end of the 2020 season to take up a three-year contract with Canterbury Bulldogs. Thompson has been with Saints since he was 11 years old, making his first team debut in 2013. He has played 157 times in the red vee and helped them to two Grand Final wins. Alongside Alex Walmsley and James Roby he is part of the most formidable front three in the club game. His Man Of The Match performance in the 2019 Super League Grand Final earned him the Harry Sunderland Trophy and marked him out as one of the hottest properties in the game.

It is no surprise then that the Bulldogs have swooped for his services now. This is the final season of his existing deal at Saints, meaning that no transfer fee will change hands. He is coming into what should be the prime years of his career. It was the Bulldogs who secured the services of Graham when he chose to try his hand in the NRL so they are a club who can vouch for the quality produced by Saints. A provider they can trust, if you will.

Which raises all sorts of questions not just about Saints but about Super League and the British club rugby league scene. For all the excitement around the arrivals of Sonny Bill Williams, James Maloney and Aiden Sezer into our competition the fact remains that we are powerless to stop our best home grown talent heading out of the league. If Saints - a club who have pretty much dominated the competition for two years and who must fancy themselves for a real tilt at the world title when Sydney Roosters come to town on February 22 - cannot persuade their best locally produced players to spend the peak years of their careers with them it is a worrying sign for all of Super League. Are our best clubs just becoming feeder clubs for their NRL counterparts?

The problem is largely but not solely financial. The marquee rule was introduced to Super League to help clubs keep their best players. Even taking into account that you can only offer marquee money to two players at any one time, theoretically Saints could have offered Thompson as much money as he will be making with the Bulldogs without it impacting too much on their salary cap. Yet you get a sense that even if they had done so - and who knows maybe they did - Thompson would still have chosen to take the opportunity to leave. The NRL offers a greater competitive challenge to the top players more regularly.

The predictability of Super League has been addressed to an extent by the salary cap. That is evidenced by Salford’s run to last season’s Grand Final. Yet there are still games which lack the level of intensity that is on show in the NRL from week to week. Thompson is not cruising at Saints. Far from it. Kristian Woolf and Justin Holbrook before him are Head Coaches who would never allow their players to get too comfortable and take their foot off the gas. But perhaps there are times when the very best players in Super League are not tested as much as they could be. If Thompson wants to find out what the true extent of his potential is he may be more likely to find out in a team which ran 12th in last season’s NRL table than in one that has looked on a different level to its Super League opponents over the last two years.

So if we accept the reasons for Thompson’s departure what can we do about it in terms of filling that gaping hole in the squad? There may not be any long term solutions. Fans will point to the next generation of academy graduate props, Matty Lees and Jack Ashworth as the men who could potentially be the next Luke Thompson. One or both of these may yet develop to the level that Thompson has reached. But if they do what is to stop them from trying their hands in the NRL also? Despite their youth and their attachment to the club through its academy there is nothing to suggest that either Lees or Ashworth would offer the best years of their careers to Saints if opportunities crop up south of the equator. They should of course continue to be developed. They can go on to do great things for the club over the next few years. But we cannot rely on any player, home grown or otherwise, beyond the length of his current contract. The reality is that there has to be an element of short-termism about our thinking in this climate.

Thompson’s departure will free up a reasonable amount of space on the salary cap. Kyle Amor and Zeb Taia are two others whose deals end at the end of the current season. While there was a distinct lack of new players joining the club for this season the loss of Thompson and the doubts surrounding Amor and Taia among others may set in motion a chain events which sees plenty of fresh recruits arriving for 2021. Woolf’s job is to assess whether to fill the Thompson gap with a ready made replacement or else put his faith in Lees and/or Ashworth to step up. If one or both does Saints may delay the need to spend big on a prop for now, and maybe even negotiate further deals with the Rochdale-born players. If Woolf does not believe either can fill Thompson’s boots from next year then he may have to get the cheque book out. Perceived wisdom is that he might look to his contacts with the Tongan national team for a replacement.

What we must not do is make the mistake of spending huge amounts of money on a vanity signing. Certain other clubs would respond to this type of loss by signing the biggest name they could get their hands on irrespective of whether they required a player in that position. That might be good for ticket and merchandise sales but it isn’t going to help you balance your squad and be the best team you can be. You don’t put a pair of false boobs on a patient that needs a heart transplant. It’s a difficult problem for Woolf to ponder just a week into his first season at the helm. Yet you would like to think that he had been briefed on the possibility that this would happen when he took the job. In announcing this now Saints have given themselves 12 months to figure out how to cover the loss so there is evidence there of some forward planning. It also eliminates the speculation around Thompson’s future which threatened to be a distraction. The club had to deal with that throughout most of last year as Holbrook was courted by NRL clubs before finally joining Gold Coast Titans. Saints were unlikely to be keen on a repeat of that scenario with Thompson.

In his statement announcing Thompson’s decision to leave Saints Chairman Eamon McManus offered the usual crumb of comfort line. You know the one about how one day we might welcome Thompson back to the club? The only way I see that happening is if Thompson doesn’t succeed personally or professionally in Australia. That does happen. Wigan have welcomed back a number of their stars who went to test themselves in the NRL but didn’t stick at it for one reason or another. But a more likely outcome is that Thompson will emulate everything that Graham has done, earning the respect of everyone in the NRL and showing up in England only when there are home internationals taking place. If that transpires there should not be an emotional clamour for his return to Saints 10 years from now when he will be past his best. That’s why any thoughts of replacing Thompson with Graham now should be thought about wistfully for around three seconds and then dismissed.

Shaun Wane has just been appointed England coach and will hope to benefit from this move. Some say his predecessor Wayne Bennett selected NRL-based players purely because they plied their trade in the superior competition even if they were not necessarily better options. But if Thompson makes it as a front rower with the Bulldogs he will have earned an England shirt. He will probably take it right off the back of Graham. Before then his focus will no doubt be on adding to his medal collection with Saints. A third Grand Final ring will be the aim. It would be a fitting way to end more than a decade of association with his boyhood favourites.