While some fans may have forgotten the dreaded round 13 rule and the havoc it caused amongst NRL club’s up until 2015, the repercussions of this questionable rule are still being felt in the NRL to this day.
To put it briefly, what the round 13 rule allowed players to do was allow any player that had signed a contract with another club for the following season to renege on their commitment and instead re-sign with their current club prior to the round 13 deadline.
First implemented in 2008, the controversial ruling was scrapped in mid-2015 following the now infamous Daly Cherry-Evans saga, after Cherry-Evans backed out of his four-year contract with the Gold Coast Titans to instead re-sign on a lifetime deal with the Sea Eagles worth roughly $1.3 million annually.
Here are the top five contract backflips in the NRL era.
4. Josh Papalii
After making a name for himself as a dynamic and bruising second rower over the first two seasons of his career in the nation’s capital, Josh Papalii shocked the NRL when he declared that “I want to play under Ricky Stuart” and signed a three-year deal with the Parramatta Eels in late February of 2013.
Still only 20-years-old at the time and with reservations about leaving his family and friends in Canberra, rumours of Papalii getting cold feet about his new deal to leave the Raiders began circulating almost immediately.
Only two weeks after the ink dried on his Eels contract, Papalii announced that he would instead be remaining at the Raiders thanks to a new contract tying him down until the end of 2016, reneging on his contract with the blue and gold.
Funnily enough, Papalii ended up playing under Ricky Stuart only a year later, when Stuart was released from the remaining two years of his contract with Parramatta in order to continue his coaching career at his beloved Raiders.
is tackled during the round 11 NRL match between the Canberra Raiders and the North Queensland Cowboys at GIO Stadium on May 25, 2019 in Canberra, Australia. (Photo by Tracey Nearmy/Getty Images)
Inglis also promised to return to Melbourne at the earliest possible moment but he never did.
Might have been a blessing in disguise.
What about “salary cap cameron”? Loudly claimed at a press conference that he was staying with the Storm to be loyal, only to sign a highly secretive contract to stay. Could have been the greatest player ever but just like Dimitri and that goat, will only be remembered for being the biggest salary cap cheat in the games history.
I thought Tim Moltzen welshing on Saints might have got a mention.
Smith will go down as 1 of the greatest players of all time and will definitely become an immortal. He is still the best hooker in the game and he is 36 years old, nobody controls a game like him.
Are you a Queenslander?
Smith will never be an immortal, you need credibility for that and Smith has none. He will only be known as the biggest salary cap cheat the game has ever seen.
The French Dressed Chickens didn’t want to pay the money to keep him.
They’d rather buy a winger, buy another winger to replace the first injured winger they bought .Then pay another third winger to put him in the top grade , when the second winger they bought was also injured . Evidently that’s somehow cheaper than keeping the original winger ( Ferguson ) & paying him what he was worth. Only in Nugget land could that be cheaper….