I recently did a video on Parramatta's 2007 NRL season on my Youtube channel. It's a little video series I have done over the last couple of years where I pick a season from a team and talk about how it went. I've done a few on Parramatta but this is the most recent one. The thing that annoys me most about the season was we found out three year later we had lost that 2007 preliminary final, along with the 2006 qualifying final and 2009 grand final to an illegal team that were well over the salary cap. If your interested the link is below.
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We fielded an illegal team also under the current coach
Totally different set of circumstances to Melbourne though. They had two separate books, one with the real contracts and dealings and the fake ones they lodged with the NRL. The real books were kept at Brian Waldron's home. If it weren't for the anonymous whistleblower they would never have been caught. David Gallop said it was the most elaborate cheating he had ever seen in his life. A bit different to ours where the NRL knew since 2013 we were over the cap but mysteriously only decided to act on it when we had a good start to the season in 2016. Then you had Manly who were over the salary cap from 2013-2017 and all they got was a fine, no points deduction, nowt.
The whole thing never sat right with me. The NRL knew we were over since 2013 but only acted on it in 2016 when we finally started doing well again (I think we were third when the punishment got handed down). The NRL CEO at the time were Greenberg who is a Canterbury-Bankstown life member and their former CEO. New Zealand, Cronulla and Manly were all over the salary cap and just got a fine but we got 12 points?.
There is absolutely no comparison between the storm's systematic rorting of the cap and the eels clumsy attempt to basically emulate what every other successful club was doing and is still doing through contravening 'third party payments'
2007 was a cracking team with a massive backline - Hayne, Grothe Jnr, Tahu, Ben Smith. Grothe Jnr was awesome that year. He had a career that was somewhat plagued by injury and early on some poor attitude but when he was on he was very, very good. I still maintain that an injury free Grothe Jnr was the fastest player I've ever seen over the length of a footy field. He's the only player I ever saw run around Matt Bowen and Matt Sing and I never saw anyone run him down. Conversely he would routinely run down speedsters within about 15 metres
Eric Grothe Jnr was a good player when he were on. He did have some personal problems/injuries and I don't think he was always focused 100% on playing rugby league as he fancied himself as a bit of a musician. I think leaving us and going to Eastern Suburbs was a bad move for him and he quickly came back to us where I thought he did well.