Foran should give Eels the slip

Kieran Foran. Photo / Otago Daily Times

If I was Kieran Foran, I would walk away from the deal with the Eels.

The shemozzle over his contract shows nothing has changed at the club, which has been in disarray for the past 15 years.

How on earth did they get into this situation? I mean, who thinks giving Foran $1 million if he decides to break his contract is a good idea? And how did management and the board agree to this, if indeed they knew?

I used to help draw up contracts in my time with the Warriors in the late 1990s but it was done with the chief executive and had to be signed off by the board.

Foran's deal smacks of one person putting it together.

I don't blame Foran at all and I feel sorry for him.

This is a totally different situation to the Daly Cherry-Evans situation — Cherry-Evans back-flipped on a four-year deal to join the Titans and deserves to be roundly criticised for not honouring that contract — because Foran has done nothing wrong here and he's well within his rights to walk away from the deal.

I don't know him but he sounds like an honorable man and has talked about honouring the contract. I wouldn't.

To me, it proves nothing has changed at Parramatta. They have been beset by board and salary cap upheavals, as well as management and coaching issues. They have shot themselves in the foot so many times and it's absolutely mind-boggling that they, once again, let themselves get in a situation like this.

It looked like things had been turning around on and off the field. The announcement of his signing on a four-year $4.8 million deal seemed to lift the spirits of the club and they were even playing OK on the field, winning their last three before last week's bye (including wins over the Storm, Cowboys and Panthers) and moving off the bottom of the table.

The club are financially viable, and are likely to always be healthy, so there is no reason for the NRL to step in but it must be utterly depressing for the players and fans for their marquee signing to be on the brink of walking away.

Turmoil is clearly still bubbling away at the place and the Foran debacle is another sad chapter in a once proud club.