BY DAN

As reported by the Canberra Times, the Canberra Raiders are giving Hohepa Puru more time to decide if he wants to pick up his option for next year and I’m about ready to panic.

If Puru hasn’t picked up his option and needs more time, it’s hard for me to think it’s for any reason other than to see what other options are out there for him. If he does find a better deal out there I presume Canberra can still match it, and still get him to stay. But given the lack of length in what they’re asking him to take, the options that may be out there, the pull factor of his brother in Sydney, and the fact that the pathway to first grade hasn’t exactly been clear, it’s starting to feel desperate.

Puru, as you may have caught in these pages, is a really fucking good footballer. As we’ve noted so often it should just be predicative text, he offers a unique set of skills that Canberra need and currently don’t have. He’s as good as a distributor of the ball through the middle third as the Raiders have. He’s agile, capable of toe-tapping his way past bigger, less nimble players in the trenches, while also increasingly capable of winning the battle when they’re coming the other way. Add to that the fact he’s a leader, a smart footballer in a club with less IQ than an episode of MAFS, and you can understand why the Raiders should want to keep him.

Puru is currently in year one of a two year deal. The second year is a player option, meaning that if he wants out he can just walk. Like right now. There are two ways to combat this. The first is obvious. Don’t give him the option in the first place by offering him more money and/or more certainty last year. Time travel not being an option, the next best thing is to do that now, providing clarity about his role and value going forward. Tell him you see him as your lock of the future. Tell him that you’re grooming him for something greater. Give him whatever you gave Trey Mooney, and realise their potential to be the ying to the others yang.

But Canberra haven’t done that. They, as usual, have been conservative. They’ve noted the deal in place and have decided not to up it. They’ve not tried to tempt him through giving his opportunities in first grade. This would make sense if they hadn’t spent this season running Morgan Smithies into the ground, grafting Emre Guler into some ill-conceived role as the big minutes middle and generally finding any reasons to keep Puru whittling away his youth in Cup footy despite proving week-in and week-out that he’s destined for greater things.

Even when it has become clear they desperately could use his skills in first grade, either as a 13 or in rake relief they’ve stuck with the known factors. I presume the case against Puru goes something like “he’s young, and he’s not big, and we can’t win if we don’t control the middle in defence”. Which makes a shit ton of sense until you realise that with old and big people they have the same problem. At least the Puru option would open up the offence.

This reticence to push young players forward isn’t a blanket rule (see Ethan Strange) and we’ve always trusted that the people in the club know more than us. We, after all, do our best work with a cat at our feet and a whisky in our hand. But this lack of pathway, this reluctance to trust the talent you’ve spotted, could cost the club important players like Puru. It nearly cost them Mooney this year. There is a risk that the wrong lesson was taken from that outcome (by the club and by us). Instead of seeing it as a bullet dodged, it seems like the club believes that they can have their cake and eat it too.

Or, as likely, they just don’t rate Puru as much as I do. I guess that’s ok. I’m wrong more often than I’m right (about literally anything but especially football). They are people who sweat more footy IQ than I’ve managed to acquire in my flimsy existence. But there’s a greater-than-zero chance that the Raiders are going to ‘softly-softly’ their way into missing out on a talented footballer because they’ve ignored the bird in hand. That it’s the exact kind of player they desperately need, now and into tomorrow. It could represent a weakness in how they’re structuring and coaching this team.

Look I may be stressed but it doesn’t mean you have to. This could all be part of the regular to and/or fro on negotiation and roster management. You can’t wig out and sell the farm every time a young player might leave. You’d have no farm and no players by the end of it. Playing it cool is probably smart roster management and smarter negotiation. But it’s a risk, and right now it feels as risky as it gets. I hope they keep Puru. But as much as any point before now, I’m not sure they will.

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