BY DAN

Danny Weidler says Josh Papalii wants to stay a year. Don Furner says the big guy has already agreed to a deal overseas. Just what is going on?

It’s seems like a confusing mess, and the likelihood now is that we won’t know until we know. At this point it seems that Papalii doesn’t particularly want to leave the party and is looking for a reason to stick around. One more round with his best mates?

That’s the easy bit of the discussion. We’ve all assumed Papa had half a foot in sticking about, and was only ever going because the Raiders had effectively told him his future would be better elsewhere. The club has been effusive in their praise of him. This is now at the point that they have given him so many flowers that they’ll be able to line his path out of the club in them.

This overture that Papa would be open to stay, presumably made by Papalii’s management through the reporting from Weidler today, was met with Don Furner pointing out he’s signed a deal elsewhere. The reporting pointed out that the Raiders can’t match the money or years that St Helens has reportedly offered.

You can interpret this two ways. If you’re a pessimist like me, you’ll take it as the club saying the situation hasn’t changed from their perspective. Effectively goodbye and thanks for all the fish footy. Maybe that’s driven by promises made to other players, and a recognition they think they’ve gotten the best they can get out of Papa. I’d contend they could get more out of the hero of the people, but I also bit my own teeth yesterday…somehow. Maybe Papa has told them he wants to go and this is just noise trying to get St Helen’s to come with the cash.

It could also be a reticence borne from a wariness of public negotiations. An acknowledgment that any deal for him to continue on would be on a team-friendly deal, or at least not as Papa friendly as on offer elsewhere. If Furner was approached by the Times today with Wiedler’s comments, you would expect him to play it with a straight bat and tell the facts as he knows them.

It doesn’t have to mean he’s not interested. It might just mean he doesn’t want to sacrifice the negotiating room with either whatever overseas club he’ll now have to do a bit of a do-si-do, or with Papalii’s management.

Today we were excited, but unfortunately whatever cosmic dance is going on here is likely still playing out. We warned to wait for the club’s next move. That next move was to deny there is a move. I guess we wait a little bit longer.

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