The inside story of star recruit Jesse Ramien’s shock exit from Newcastle
Jesse Ramien’s shock exit from Newcastle is a convection of everything about modern football - wage disputes, player power and the need of a coach to put a team above the individual, writes PAUL KENT
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Nathan Brown took a swing for the coaches during the week.
He leaned way back on his back leg and balled up his fist and swung like it all depended on it when he sacked Jesse Ramien days before the biggest game of Newcastle’s season.
Ramien is 22 and a supreme talent.
He is everything, at his best, Newcastle need. A great threat on the edges, fast and big.
A year ago he was part of the NSW emerging Origin squad. Teams from around the league turned up on his door, batting their eyes with fat contracts and grand talk.
Ramien breathed it in like he breathed air itself.
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He committed to the Knights but almost immediately the fit was wrong. His form took off at Cronulla so much the Sharks wondered quietly if they could keep him.
The Knights weren’t budging. They had done a magnificent deal.
In this salary cap era the game is won and lost around value. The Knights paid an average $375,000 a year for Ramien and the way he finished the season with Cronulla they soon realised they had a player worth far more than that.
It began to be a problem when Ramien realised it, too.
He turned up in Newcastle and kicked a few stones because somewhere along the line somebody told him the Knights got him cheap and he knew he could have been earning more money.
It is always here that things get murky.
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Nothing kills a player’s enthusiasm for his club more than the belief he is being underpaid.
Clubs can’t immediately rectify that, though. Salary caps are finely balanced. Money is limited.
The art of the deal is always timing.
Clubs will pay more for a young player hoping that, by the final year of his contract, he is providing value above what he is being paid to deliver. Pay now, reap later.
Ramien turned up at Newcastle believing he was already being underpaid.
If the game is the art of the deal, Brown had done a magnificent job.
But it was never that simple.
Three times the Knights got a call, from three rival clubs, saying Ramien’s camp had approached them saying he wasn’t happy and they were gauging interest to see if they were keen to take him.
Brown knew it could be a problem but his job was to coach and find a way to keep Ramien happy.
A fortnight ago the Knights fought for a time against Sydney Roosters before surrendering it away. They trailed by two points with 25 minutes left and lost 48-10.
Afterwards Brown, who likes to ask himself questions at his post-match press conference before he answers them, said, “Will we play a better team than the Roosters in the next month? Probably not, but there’s going to be some decisions asked of players that are going to be big factors in where we finish on the scoreboard.
“So we certainly can’t ignore it.”
Privately, Ramien was one of those players Brown was speaking of. Brown should have dropped Ramien then.
Ramien had committed what is among the great sins of professional sport; his teammates didn’t believe he tried hard enough.
This week Brown pulled the trigger.
Cronulla got a phone call from Ramien’s dad asking if there was still interest. The Sharks rang Newcastle to see if he was available.
Wednesday night after training Brown walked over to Ramien.
“I hear your dad is shopping you around?” he said.
“I don’t take that personally, and don’t take this personally, but go and pack your bags and go and play somewhere else where you’re happy with the money you’re on.”
Simple as that.
That it was done with no deal negotiated to lessen the cap pressure at Newcastle reveals the urgency the Knights believed he needed to go.
He sacked Ramien after the June 30 transfer and too late for Ramien to land elsewhere this season.
It reveals the strength of Brown’s decision.
Saturday afternoon’s result against Manly might well decide Newcastle’s season. The Knights are a win out of the top eight and are in the fight to their elbows, with half a dozen other clubs, to make the finals.
By sacking Ramien the week of such a vital game Brown could potentially have put himself in the firing line.
This is often how it begins.
Ramien’s exit was a sign of the new world in the NRL. Players, and increasingly their managers, carry tremendous power at most clubs.
A quiet phone call, a gathering of numbers, and suddenly they are away.
Few clubs have the strength to take on the playing group no matter how wrong they are, making coaches often the most disposable job in every the NRL.
Look at the Gold Coast.
The Titans players fell out of love with Neil Henry. The rebellion was led by Jarryd Hayne, in spirit if not action when Hayne and Henry fell out.
The club sided with Hayne.
Henry was gone and in came Garth Brennan.
Part of Brennan’s appeal was a special relationship, they said, with Ash Taylor, the Titans’ most crucial player now Hayne was gone.
That didn’t save him and Brennan was gone.
So the Titans playing group, which has done nothing that would resemble success, has seen off the coaching careers of two good men and taken no accountability for themselves.
Coaches are expendable.
It is easier and far cheaper to wheel in a new coach than it is to offload a core group of troublesome players.
That was the risk Brown faced this week. How would unloading a talent like Ramien affect his players?
Players know not only the value of talent but how necessary it is to win.
A backlash on the eve of an important game like this one could be devastating.
Ramien will go elsewhere and somebody will pay him what he believes he should have been getting at Newcastle.
The Knights will fight for their season this afternoon against Manly with a coach who knows his only mistake was not sacking Ramien earlier.
The week before the Roosters they lost to Canterbury, currently second last, and the week after they lost 28-26 to Wests Tigers.
Two wins in some winnable games would have changed their finals chances completely.
Brown is unconcerned about letting Ramien go. He stood up for his club, a fight that is not always returned but was this week.
In the days after Ramien got sacked several senior players call him.
You did the right thing, they said.
RULES MUST CHANGE FOR QUAYLE
John Quayle is the perfect man to assume Mark Coyne’s role on the Australian Rugby League Commission but at the moment he remains ineligible because of an archaic rule.
Quayle resigned from the Newcastle Knights board 18 months ago so does not qualify under the three year rule.
It is timely to begin the talk to change it.
This week the NRL administration revealed itself, not for the first, as an organisation that is, at best, naive in its running of the game.
One of the great attractions of sport is its unpredictability. Anybody can do anything, provided they are good enough and it does not matter how popular or unpopular they are.
Not every outcome is palatable, and not every outcome is preferred, but that is the uncertainty of sport and, yes, the beauty of sport.
As soon as sports begin working to desirable outcomes it loses the essence of what attracts us, because after that it is all fake.
Wrestling began going down this road years back and soon lost control. So much, wrestling is no longer a legitimate sport but instead exists under the crown “sports entertainment”.
Concerns about the NRL’s questionable running of the game come as the boss of the NSW Rugby League, Dave Trodden, released his book this week “The Commission We Had To Have”.
Trodden believes the three-year rule was necessary at the time given the distrust between the ARL and News Corp, the NSW and Queensland Rugby Leagues, and the 16 clubs.
The three year rule served its purpose.
“People with integrity don’t need a three-year clearance period,” he said.
Quayle is among the best sports administrators this country has seen. His return is no longer desirable, but necessary.
Originally published as The inside story of star recruit Jesse Ramien’s shock exit from Newcastle
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