Jim Tucker: With a body battered by 11 years of pro footy, Karmichael Hunt’s best option is the Reds
ALL roads lead to the Reds for Karmichael Hunt because it’s the one place where the world is still at his feet as a footballer.
Jim Tucker
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ALL roads lead to the Reds for Karmichael Hunt because it’s the one place where the world is still at his feet as a footballer.
He could sign for two years, reactivate his value as a rugby player and head to a lucrative adventure in France or Japan in late 2016 while he is still only 29.
It is his one route to four or five more seasons of variety, top level footy and a fresh challenge.
Hunt already has a big tick in Europe from his winning run at French rugby club Biarritz in 2009-10 when he and now-wife Emma had a ball.
If he is weighing up an NRL return after his positive impact at the Gold Coast Suns in the AFL, two or three more seasons would pull him up.
Hunt is not your regulation 27-year-old. He is in his 11th year as a professional footballer since he was a whiz kid Bronco only 17 months out of school.
Even Superman’s body would be feeling the knocks a little bit more with those kilometres on the clock.
He has done everything in rugby league as an Origin series champion, a Kangaroo and NRL premiership winner.
He has already conquered the code. Why go back and potentially chisel away at that legacy?
Hunt has ruled out a move to Sydney with his wife and two kids and fancies staying with a club in south east Queensland.
The Brisbane Broncos will not have room under their salary cap and he will not have forgotten the Gold Coast Titans attacking him through then-boss Michael Searle in 2009.
Searle smeared Hunt’s code jump to AFL as a “circus’’ and needled him as “a gun for hire, a mercenary’’.
Broncos … no. Titans … no.
Unless he has a plan to play for the lower-tier Brisbane Strikers in the first round of football’s new FFA Cup on July 29, Hunt will be playing rugby in October-November.
He was a big promotional tool for AFL’s arrival on the coast and may be a drawcard for a new venture in another code.
The inaugural nine-team National Rugby Championship from late August to early November is invisible right now.
Hunt’s first steps towards the Reds fullback job, by playing for the Brisbane team in the NRC, would be a welcome crowd-puller and get him up to speed for Super Rugby.
It all fits.
Originally published as Jim Tucker: With a body battered by 11 years of pro footy, Karmichael Hunt’s best option is the Reds
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