BY DAN

Canberra remain in the Leo Thompson dance, according to the Michael Carayannis at the Daily Telegraph. They’re reporting that Canberra are part of a four team mix for his services, along with the Dogs, Dragons and Knights. Is this the dreaded Raider Raise or could Canberra snare a readymade replacement for Josh Papalii?

It’s an intriguing grouping. You have the Raiders, and you have the Knights, the team that made him, wants to keep him, signed his brother, and have made him a big offer. Then the two teams who literally put their hand up for anyone that even looks like leaving their side. A player could wander down their front path to head to the letterbox (for what? I dunno…force of habit?) and the Dogs and the Dragons would make an offer.

The reporting is that the Raiders are a ‘genuine hope’ to land Leo Thompson:

The Bulldogs have gone hard on him as well and I think the smokey is Canberra. He played football in Canberra before he went to the Knights. I think you’ll find the Raiders are a genuine hope of landing Leo Thompson

It’s hard to tell what that means. ‘Genuine hope’ also how I describe getting through an article without a typo. It’s what I tell my kids when they ask if we can get Maccas on the way home. I genuinely hoped David Fifita would join the Raiders. So let’s not get too carried away. ‘He played in Canberra’ as a selling point isn’t the strongest either. That can also be read as ‘the Raiders let him go before and now he’s leveraging them for the coldest revenge possible’.

But it’s undeniable. Canberra are interested, and the pure scepticism that flows through my veins can’t even deny that it seems that it’s between the Raiders and the Knights. To get Leo to wander down the yellow brick road in search of Canberra pride would require paying at the top of the market for a resource they already have in abundance, and that they can manufacture elsewhere. Would Leo be the second best middle they have on the side the minute he joined? Probably. Could they get 95 per cent of Thompson’s output through the Leo Thompson’s they already have at home, without the opportunity cost? Also probably.

It’s interesting that there’s all this hullabaloo over an admittedly very good, but also manufacturable, middle. According to the Daily Telegraph, the third highest paid position group in the NRL is props. I presume that’s an figure found on averaging but I’m too tired to do maths. I’d always thought middles were the group that could be treated most like NFL running backs (created out of thin air and disposed just as quickly). But something has changed in recent years. Good middles feel more valued with each passing year. And when you look at how Canberra crater through the middle 40 of the game when their best leave the field, you can understand them wanting to bolster with a proven prop.

Having a young one even moreso. Josh Papalii is set to retire after 2025, and if you believe the reporting in this article, Emre Guler will also leave on the same timeline. Replacing these two with a talented international entering their prime seems worth the gamble, even if you’re paying full ticket price for him. The bet is big, but there’s a greater-than-zero possibility that you could get him for his 2024 ticket price and reap the surplus value of further improvement that follows as he enters his prime. Smarter people than me are making that decision.

But that *is* getting carried away, as I suggested earlier we shouldn’t. This reporting isn’t even that Canberra are in the drivers seat. Just a genuine hope, which seems deliberately enticing, as though his manager was dropping info to less diligent journalists in an attempt to gussy up a bigger deal from the home crowd. We’ve seen it before, so perhaps we’re acting out of pain.

I guess we’ll find out.

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