The Daily Telegraph is reporting today that the Penrith Panthers inquired about the availability of Wigan fullback Sam Tomkins and were blown away by the price demanded for the youngsters services.
After chasing Johnathan Thurston, and missing out, the Panthers now find themselves with over $1 million to spend under the salary cap and yet with no players worth that much money left on the market.
With the at best uninspired signing of Brent Kite under their belts, the Panthers obviously are looking for and wide to make sure they don’t go into next season carrying $1 million in dead salary cap space.
Sam Tomkins has talked about wanting to play in the NRL in the past, but I have always said he is going to Rugby Union. He went close a couple of seasons ago before signing a long term deal with Wigan that has all the hallmarks of a Wigan youngster locking himself into his local club so that they would get the payoff of a huge transfer fee somewhere down the road.
When it comes to NRL clubs signing Super League players, they hate these transfer fees. Transfer fees count under the NRL salary cap, so to pay for a Super League players salary and then also have his transfer fee under their cap, it just means it is not worth the financial hit to an NRL club.
I have spoken a number of times before about my concerns with Sam Tomkins game. He is terrible under the high ball, not even close to NRL level. He is a faily lean player too, there are players running around in the NYC Under 20’s competition that look more physically prepaired to play in the NRL than Sam Tomkins does.
Tomkins plays in a competition where defense is a dirty word. His style of game is well suited to that. His style of running game would be completely negated when facing up against an NRL defensive line. We have seen what happens when Tomkins plays against Australia in test football, he is completely shut down in attack. I think we would see that on a weekly basis in the NRL.
With all that to consider, no NRL club is going to pay big money for Tomkins in his first season. The only way I could see Tomkins earning big money in the NRL is if we see a deal late, with a team that has a huge amount of salary cap space it doesn’t want to leave unused and it offers Tomkins a one year deal to use up that cap space.
That is a huge risk though, especially for Tomkins himself. If he played in the NRL and was completely exposed, his value would nosedive. Not to mention the potential of a serious injury during that one year deal.
Most people probably think I am horrified that the Panthers would look to get Tomkins in the side, but I’m not. We are not really going anywhere anyway and we have money under the cap that needs to be spent. I want to see Sam Tomkins playing in the NRL. I hate these English players that stick to their comfort zones and endlessly talk about playing in the worlds best competition without ever making any real attempt to play here.
Harvey Howard, Adrian Morley James Graham, Sam, Luke and George Burgess….these are all players that just did it. They didn’t endlessly talk about it, they took less money to come over, start from scratch and just did it.
If Sam Tomkins wants to play in the NRL he will have to lower his asking price. It is that simple.
