Eels Blogs

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/nrl/a-new-ossie-ostrich/story-e6frfgh6-1225852183928

WE ARE very tight at this club - to say there is a rift is not correct. So says Paul Osborne, the Parramatta chief executive who, for the first time since taking over from Denis Fitzgerald, is realising what it's like to sweat bullets while occupying the hot seat.

It depends on what you define as a rift but, given the nature of last year's bloodbath that disposed of Fitzgerald, these current times in Eels Land seem like the tsunami warning from last month that produced nothing but a ripple along the east coast.

Yet make no mistake: there's a storm brewing at Parramatta and victory against Canberra tomorrow cannot come quick enough. Not to arrest their alarming lack of form, but the cracks that are forming elsewhere. You didn't have to read too closely between the lines during the week to see them.

Osborne insists his comments at the start of this week that contract negotiations for off-contract players beyond this season had been put on ice were merely throwaway lines - but the damage was done.

The leak about Nathan Cayless's retirement at season's end, forcing him to hold a hastily arranged doorstop interview, never intended to hurt the captain - but the damage was done.

It mightn't be a rift, but there is definitely trouble in paradise.

This time last year, after the Bulldogs had wiped the Eels 48-18 at ANZ Stadium, coach Daniel Anderson said: "We have to appeal to the players' sense of pride. Their pride in the Parramatta jersey. At times today we didn't have that sense of pride."

What Anderson's quote doesn't convey is the look on Cayless's face as he sat beside him that day. The captain's stare threatened to drill a hole through the back wall, his jaw clenched. It was heavy.

Cayless would never make a good poker player, because last week he wore the same expression - one that would have melted Tony Soprano.

He'd made the call to retire a month ago but wanted the news set free via a press release, such is his way. When The Daily Telegraph website beat him to the punch and broke the yarn, the red mist appeared to descend again.

It was a look reminiscent of Brad Fittler after he had learned through a Sunday newspaper late last season that Brian Smith would be replacing him before anyone had told him.

And this is what that particular look says: I have worked my guts out for this joint for years, shed blood and broken bones ... then you treat me like THIS!?

Like Fittler, Cayless deserved better.

Word is there's an investigation underway to uncover the leak at Parramatta, but a Whitehouse-style internal inquiry will not appease the captain or those players who felt he has been treated shabbily.

Osborne's remark about ceasing contract discussions given the side's glacial start has merely fuelled the acrimony. Nathan Hindmarsh admitted as much on Channel Ten the following day. Eric Grothe, one of the players Osborne was seemingly referring to, dodged the question on The Matty Johns Show on Thursday night, but his nose looked firmly out of joint.

"We're not rolling the red carpet out at the moment," Osborne says when I asked him if he regretted his comments. "We're not banging down the door to sign anyone."

On one hand, fair enough: why re-sign players if they are not performing? On the other, it strikes at the heart of what a player holds so dear: his sense of pride, his ego. They don't like it - and you would hope right now they are doing enough introspection.

Daniel Anderson has more pressing issues than this.

He needs a kill, and on that front he has plenty on his plate.

When did the Eels, stretching back to their magical carpet ride that started in round 18 last year, triumph in a match when Jarryd Hayne wasn't the irresistible force?

Hayne is 21 and massively gifted but, according to insiders, he's struggling to grapple with the onus of being The Man since the Eels were put up as premiership favourites.

When it hasn't been Hayne, it's been Fuifui Moimoi. Parramatta, without that pair at their zenith (yet), have won merely one match, and even that was off a pass so forward you would've thought Peyton Manning threw it.

Parramatta endured a revolution last year when new chairman Roy Spagnolo overthrew the Fitzgerald regime. Central to his platform was bringing disgruntled former players from the 1980s back into the bosom.

A club is nothing without its history, the forefathers who paved the way. But the ones on the paddock mean more.

"It's nothing that a win won't fix," Osborne says of the current non-rift. He can only hope that is all it will take.