Melbourne Storm is on the verge of shipping Cameron Munster north to continue his playing career, with the NRL powerhouse reportedly at the end of their rope when it comes to their enigmatic halves star and his headline-grabbing ways.
Munster is set to quietly hit the player market heading into 2022, The Sporting Base has heard, with powerbrokers at the southern organisation rubber-stamping a sensational bid to shift the 27-year-old on before the start of next season.
The Storm five-eighth hit the headlines in the build-up to the grand final — which Melbourne will not be playing in — after being filmed with an illicit substance in a leaked Mad Monday video.
The controversy, one of the first for Melbourne in years, may be the straw on the camel’s back.
It is this The Sporting Base writer’s understanding that Storm management has already had one eye raised at Munster for a long time, a fact that was compounded after he came out the week before a potential record-setting twentieth straight win for the club to declare himself “open” to shifting to the NRL’s seventeenth club in 2023.
The surprise sound-off is far from the first time Munster has, as some at the club say, “put his foot in it” when talking to the media at crunch times. More recently, following an insipid performance against the Panthers, Munster claimed that his team deserved to be in the final more.
Warning sirens are already ringing at several NRL clubs after the Munster move leaked to the media. The Sporting Base understands several are very interested in securing the star for 2022.
Those potential suitors include the Canberra Raiders, Gold Coast Titans, Wests Tigers, and the cash flushed St George Illawarra Dragons, though Anthony Griffin’s plans still remain to blood the club’s ever-promising batch of young juniors, if possible.
The truth of the matter though is that no NRL club would turn down a player of Munster’s calibre. Since breaking into the top-flight in 2015 he’s played 151 games for the Storm.
In that same time, the 27-year-old has never finished worse than a preliminary final.
The star was the Dally M Five-Eighth medalist in 2018 and 2019, and was awarded State of Origin’s highest individual plaudit, the Wally Lewis Medal for man of the series, as Queensland staged an incredible 2-1 victory over the Blues last year.
The only cog in any potential wheel will be Munster’s vocal interest in joining the Queensland expansion team as their franchise player when they join the league in 2023.
That means any club looking to pick up the now-purple star will have the understanding they’re only scoring his talents for a single premiership season, and all the question marks that come with settling into a new city and club will be in play over those 12 months as well.
The best fit, then, would be the Raiders or the Dragons. The Titans and Tigers are sniffing around for long-term options, but Canberra and St George Illawarra both boast hefty junior cohorts. The ability to slowly blood them in over 2022 before taking the jumper full-time in 2023 could be appetising for the ambitious heavyweights.
The Sporting Base could even see Munster sticking it out in Melbourne for one more year, before being released a year early to join the Dolphins/Jets/Firehawks when they hit the scene in 2023.
