Jackson Hastings

HarVeeGee13 said:
Most clubs are stuffed if they lose their starting halfback tbh. You won’t find much better cover than Gamble or Clune if you run the ruler through other squads. Sean O’Sullivan was probably the best performing back up 7 last year and he’s going to be a starter at a different club this year. Braydon Trindall is probably the best back-up half in the NRL now.
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i agree

People forget that Clune was playing well before he injured his knee, then he carried it the rest of the year. Clune was also only ever meant to be the back up to Pearce, but then Pearce left for France making Clune our starter.

Having Gamble and Clune as back ups is probably better than most other clubs
 
Owey said:
It was having the mail early that got me excited. I told every knights fan I could get hold of. Even at the girls civic celebration, i told the daughter if we got close enough to Bedsy I'd say "Great news about Brooks signing here" just to see his reaction. She was glad he moved on before I could. I was never sold on Brooks but was hoping Joey could make it work somehow? I think Hastings is a much better fit, on the the field at least. I hope he becomes a leader, not a disruptor off it.
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Lol dw I also told everyone I know 😅
 
Gunna give Hastings a chance .....It's November and know other

player comin or wants the jumper.............don't like to say for some reason

were on the nose...............
 
Interesting little tidbit, the Knights were one of the clubs who really went hard for Jackson Hastings just before he turned 18 when he was murdering the Holden Cup. He picked the Roosters who at that time still had Pearce and Maloney. One wonders how his career would have panned out if he joined us back then. One has to assume Tyrone Roberts wouldn’t have been a great impediment to him taking that #7 jersey.
 
This is like 5th hand gossip but I heard $1.6 million/3 years is what we’re paying Hastings. Pretty much what we were trying to get Brooks for. He was on about 850/2 at Wests.

This explains how we can chip in for Klem but still have freed up cap space (which Parr said we did in the Herald).
 
I think it's reflective of what the market thinks of him as a player more than anything.

Like, he's better than clune but not that much better.

And I think it speaks volumes that they're trying to get kp into the halves without having anyone to replace him at fullback, Hastings and gamble would be an improvement on last year but still the worst halves pairing in the comp.
 
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He came back to the tigers on a 300k/500k two year deal and now getting a bit more than that .

Im sure he thinks he could heaps more at another club and is coming to the knights at a discount out of the kindness of his heart right?

This is a very likely scenario because great players regularly leave money on the table to go to bad clubs with unproven coaches
 
HarVeeGee13 said:
He never went to the open market.
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As soon as the tigers said he was free to negotiate with other clubs he's on the market. If he was half the player you seem to think he is it should have sparked a bidding frenzy right.

Or maybe everyone but the knights was happy with who they already have, and the desperate knights would have to pay the most. Sounds like market decided to me.
 
The Tigers were in negotiations with Klemmer, the Knights weren’t willing to release him for nothing, and contacted them asking if they’d be willing to let us talk to Hastings. The two moves were conditional on the other. He was not “free to negotiate with anyone”. Helen Keller could see this, unless she was keen to be a contrarian.

Technically Hastings was on the market for 2024, but just because you can speak to players doesn’t mean they will want to speak to you this far out, and yes he is less hot property than the likes of Mitch Moses and Dylan Brown, but you could say that about most of the halves in the comp.
 
The market for Hastings to play halfback in the NRL was like us, the dogs and probably the warriors.

The dogs were interested a few months back but went cold because everyone they talked to said he was an abrasive character who has caused problems everywhere he went.

If he doesn't want to move to NZ that doesn't leave a lot of choices.

Obviously he and his manager understood this, otherwise he could have stayed at the tigers on 500k next year and cashed in for 2024 and beyond. So they took what they could get.

There's just no way he's worth 700k or whatever in the NRL, seems like everyone but old Harv can accept that.
 
I think he's easily worth $700k for us ... maybe not for other clubs, but other clubs aren't in desperate need of a half like we are. In a sense that's really irrelevant. Look at the flack the Cowboys got for signing Townsend for whatever they spent on him, but it was worth it for them to get him to the club, because that was a major cog that was missing for them.

We'll have to disagree on how good a player he is, I think he'll do a really good job for us based on what I saw in 2022. As I've said elsewhere my only concern is he recovers fully from that broken leg ... but broken legs are generally fully recoverable from, so it should be ok.
 
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