To Brierley, or Not To Brierley
No game last week due to a frosty bottom on the hill, which I know annoyed a few people, but I can tell you for nothing that me and my hangover were overjoyed.
However it affected your Sunday, it’s left us with no on field events to write about this week. Thankfully, it’s all gone a bit nuts off the field. All due to a young lad born and raised probably yards from where I’m currently sat (darkest Lancashire), who has never played in Bradford colours in his life.
Ryan Brierley has taken the bizarre, and unprecedented, step of handing in his four weeks’ notice - as if he worked in an office, or a factory, or a supermarket. His employers response was to say ‘No’ followed by suspending him and claiming he’d been illegally tapped up by Bradford; which they thought was damned cheeky from all sides and they wouldn’t be having it.
Over the next few days everybody denied everything and frantically drew halos round their sweaty heads, but it was too late by then, the seed was sewn.
Could the exciting young scrum-half - and one of the star players of Bradford Bulls’ biggest (only?) Championship rivals - really be wearing red, amber, and black by April Fools’ Day?
Well, that would be something.
Let’s pause for a moment to ask if it’s a something that us, as Bulls fans, might actually want.
Yes, of course it is. A No. 7 like Ryan Brierley is EXACTLY what the Bulls are missing. He’s quick, clever, opportunistic, and his support play is so on the money it may as well be The Queen’s head. He would perfectly compliment the - let’s be generous with our word choice here - relaxed style of Gaskell, he would always be on hand for those off loads which our existing players don’t seem interested in, and the combination between Brierley and O’Brien at dummy half would leave opponents spinning with confusion. The more I think about it, and I’ve thought about it a lot this week, Ryan Brierley is the perfect peg for our gaping scrum-half shaped hole.
So the idea of him heading to Odsal is extremely seductive, even if it is only on a short term contract until he heads off to a bigger pond in 2017.
Plus, it would be absolutely hilarious, from a laughing at Leigh point of view.
But could it actually happen?
It seems far fetched, whatever his reasons for leaving, why would a talented young player with openly stated interest from at least one Super League club, and rumours of offers from others, jump from one Championship big fish to another? Equally, with a rapidly worsening injury crisis across the whole top flight, why would a bigger budget team not move chequebook and pen in whatever way necessary to grab an opportunity like this when it came along?
Having said that. The boy is a little valuable now; just imagine how much more valuable he would be if he proved to be the missing ingredient for bringing Rugby League’s most recent fallen giants back into the elite competition? That is a big blue stamp on anybody’s CV.
And what if whatever is purported to be rotten in the Leigh camp has upset him to the point that a bit of poetic justice is just a little tempting, especially if comes with a wage rise, and the leap in profile which this whole controversy will inevitably give him.
So it seems unlikely, but it’s definitely not unthinkable.
Is there any real evidence for it happening though? Who has actually said what?
Derek Beaumont, oafish mouthwallet of Leigh, has claimed, via his caretaker coach Neil Jukes, that Ryan confessed his reasons for acting were a ‘lucrative contract’ from Bradford Bulls, and a play for an inflated wage.
But he’s also said that former coach Paul Rowley walked out because he needed a whole season to prepare for becoming coach to a Canadian League 1 team and that he’s trying to take half of the Leigh players down to the lower division with him - despite them being on the brink of a long chased Super League place. So, either everybody is against our Derek, and making bizarre career choices, or he’s paranoid.
Ryan Brierley, on the other hand, has stated none of this is true. He’s not happy with - something - at Leigh. His conscience won’t allow him to stay at the club; if that means being unemployed in a few weeks time, then so be it. He’s said he’s spoken to nobody, and he’ll take his chances once ties have been professionally and legally severed.
But he does have an agent, and surely no agent worth his salt is going to let one of his brightest young clients throw his career in the bin over a vaguely alluded principle? Steve Ferres has openly stated that he’s told that agent to contact him if, and when, Ryan becomes available; it’s particularly unlikely he’ll be the only one. So, however noble the intentions, there’s going to be a safety net, and there is sure to have been conversations.
Somebody is lying.
If Ryan is lying, then it’s a done deal and - assuming Leigh don’t suddenly swing round with a bag of money, initiate a group hug, and go back to a slightly awkward status quo - he’ll be in a Bradford shirt a few weeks from now. Though, now everything has been said, could he still go through with that without his pants setting on fire and his gentlemanly image suffering a hell of a tarnishing - or will we all just believe that coincidences happen?
If Beaumont and/or Jukes are lying then, well, anything could happen, there are no predictions, just an unemployed scrum-half and an ocean of possibilities. Our keys will surely go in the bowl, but would you pick out the rusty old fiesta fob if you had other choices?
My instinct is to side with the player, but I’m judging a book by its cover; he simply presents himself publicly with more professionalism and class then his employer, and he can also string a sentence together that doesn’t sound like it was written while chomping a pie from a trough in a low rent lap dancing bar. But then again, we could all have said the same about Cameron over Brown, and now we have a Tory government, so, y’know, once bitten...
The long and the short of it is, we don’t know. I’m willing to bet some people do, and I’m certain it will all come out in the wash. We might have to dig under the tattered ruins of Salford to see it clearly, but it’ll show up somewhere.
I’m gonna pitch it somewhere level with me showing up to work in April to discover they’ve put our wages up not only in line with this new minimum wage shebang, but by an extra few percent just for giggles. It’s possible, and I’d love it to happen, but I’d be bloody surprised.
In the meantime we have to play up and down the hill at top-of-the-table Batley tomorrow. They’ve beaten Leigh already, and they ran us close twice last season, and - let’s be completely honest - we haven’t been all that impressive this far. I haven’t been to Mount Pleasant before, and we’re dragging the nephew away from his X-Box for the day, so it’s a bit of an occasion.
I’m pretty nervous about it.
See you there!
