It is the Christmas gift that has kept on giving ever since Wests Tigers announced captain Robbie Farah had been given permission to find other employment. What happened next was/is a cluster you-know-what of gargantuan proportions.

So here we are in December, twenty-odd sleeps away from the greatest day of the year (if you’re under the age of ten) and Mr. Farah is apparently staying with the joint venture franchise presumably making him a one-club man for life.

Let’s forget the history here for a moment. Ignore the political positioning and Chinese whispers that has seen some of the great Wests Tigers club men shafted, moved on, sacked.

The fact is this unholy alliance looks set to move into the new season which spells doom depending on what side of the divide you stand.

On one side you have Coach Jason Taylor who has desperately tried to make this team his own after observing from the outside. What he found was a generational gap between the players, a lopsided balance of power between players and officials and the need for the head coach to be, well, the head coach. He watched premiership-winning mentor Tim Sheens punted (some might say it took too long after the club floundered post-2005), their most marketable player Benji Marshall so disillusioned he walked out for rugby union only to return to the St George Illawarra Dragons and a bloke called Mick Potter – stabbed in the back with a thousand daggers before ever getting a foot through the front door.

Then there’s Farah who has every right to dig the most famous heels in rugby league deep into the Concord turf.

Farah has a contract and doesn’t have to look anywhere for a new deal. What the club didn’t expect was Farah to be as daring as he has been. They assumed that the modern day process of a club giving a player permission to look elsewhere would be enough to boot Farah out.

The then-captain knew he had enough support publically and privately to stay and so far it’s working.

At the end of the day if Farah stays and the Tigers start 2016 with a whimper you might as well call JT a dead man walking.

Almost an afterthought is the signing of former Manly-Warringah’s premiership-winning rake Matt Ballin. In Taylor’s perfect world, the game plan would revolve around the newly-emancipated Luke Brooks and Mitch Moses, James Tedesco injecting himself from the back and the rotation of Ballin and star-in-waiting Manaia Cherrington.

The mission impossible now is getting Farah to play ball and buy in to the systems Taylor wants his young team to play.

Taylor almost has to play Farah round one against the New Zealand Warriors at Campbelltown Stadium. In a twist of irony, it’s the same opposition at the same venue where fans blindly and passionately booed the coach in 2015.

Hypothetically, if the Tigers go 0-4 and Farah is ripping up the VB NSW Cup, Taylor will almost certainly fall on his sword. If the Tigers go 4-0 to start the year with Farah at starting hooker, Taylor looks like an idiot. Winning without Farah, officials will look like the biggest idiots this side of Salim Mehajer and Corey Worthington.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdoGhxeSoiw

And now there is another impending catastrophe for the struggling club.

Youngsters Brooks and Moses are off contract at the end of 2016 with an option to extend their deals into 2017. Adding another butterfly in the stomach of Wests Tigers fans is the fact that Cherrington, a rising talent who went on tour with the Kiwis recently, is also off contract after the upcoming campaign.

Through all the bullshit happening now there is a chance that the only people left standing by 2017 could be the two ageing hookers in Robbie Farah and Matt Ballin.

Now there’s a scary thought.

@woodward_curtis

Video Source: Wests Tigers, NRL Hub