Gallen rebukes Smith’s salary-cap call

CRONULLA captain Paul Gallen has rebuked Cameron Smith’s calls for Melbourne’s stripped NRL premierships to be reinstated, arguing the Sharks’ salary-cap breaches pale in comparison with the Melbourne Storm’s.

Smith caused headlines last week when he claimed that Melbourne’s 2007 and 2009 titles should be handed back to them, accusing the NRL of double standards over their treatment of the Sharks’ breaches.

An NRL investigation earlier this month found that the Sharks had breached the cap by more than $700,000 between 2013 and 2017.

The majority of those breaches came in 2017, where the league claimed a former Sharks board member had set up and funded a separate com- pany to procure illegal thirdparty agreements. The league also said that while there had been illegal promises made in Cronulla’s premiership-winning year of 2016, they did not take the Sharks’ salary above the cap level.

“I will say this to Cam, be very careful what you wish for,” Gallen said on Channel 9’s Sports Sunday.

“We went in and self-reported a $50,000 discrepancy, which the CEO thought was all it was. It turned out it was a $700,000 discrepancy.

“You maybe don’t want the NRL going back and searching those books, particularly when they [Melbourne] were found to be $3.7 million over the salary cap over five years.

“Three of those years they were a million over the cap.

“Compared to the Sharks we were 750k over in intended third-party payments, the NRL found they were intended to be paid. Not all were paid.”

Gallen said he didn’t feel as if Cronulla’s maiden premiership title, which came with a grand-final win over Melbourne, had been tainted by the cap breaches.

“If we got it taken off us, I would throw my ring away and I’d quit the club immediately. It wouldn’t sit well with me,” he said. “The fact is we were under the salary cap in 2016.”