THE independent Melbourne Storm directors have been sacked. The club actually breached the salary cap by $3.17 million - 80% more than the NRL initially forecast. Melbourne will seek NRL concessions to keep its side together. Sydney Roosters recruitment manager Peter O'Sullivan has been implicated.

Forget the bullet points on the news channel, how News Ltd chairman John Hartigan feels or the 13 Storm players who were dramatically named as having received extra payments. These are the four really newsworthy aspects of Thursday's media conference by Hartigan at Holt Street.

The first issue is the most divisive. Removing the independent directors - Dr Rob Moodie, Petra Fawcett, Peter Maher and Gerry Ryan - will be a stake through the heart of Storm coach Craig Bellamy, his players and their supporters. It was this group that gave the Storm just a tiny bit of hope that one day - via a legal challenge - the club's two premierships would be handed back.

That hope is now gone. The reporter who asked Hartigan if those directors would become martyrs had a very good point. The axings were expected to come as soon as the directors launched legal action against the NRL. News, instead, waited until they failed to co-operate with the Deloitte audit and used that as grounds for dismissal.

The figure by which the club breached the salary cap is just a number to most of us - $3.17million. But it's 80 per cent larger than what was initially reported by the league on April 22 - and the size of the breach has specific relevance to the next point.

Hartigan and his chief operating officer, Peter Macourt, clearly believe that by sacking the directors they are showing "good faith" - Hartigan's words - to the NRL. He believes the Storm will die "a thousand deaths" if they are forced to play in hostile territory with four superstars plus "pub players".

The complication, he says, is that even if big names move on, the Storm will have to top up their contracts if they cannot get the "rack rate" from their new employers. This top up will come off Melbourne's cap next year and further constrain them.

The plea would be for Melbourne to receive cap discounts for these top-ups, which are a result of honouring promises that should never have been made. I can't see NRL chief David Gallop buying this sob story. Some concessions will be made - but not to the level the Storm will request.

By highlighting the size of the breach, News have only underlined to reasonable, objective folk exactly why this side should be dismantled.

If Melbourne want to avoid paying top-ups then they should sell the players most likely to get the going rate or more elsewhere - namely Billy Slater, Greg Inglis, Cooper Cronk or Cameron Smith. Problem solved.

If they're not willing to do that, then "a thousand deaths"and "a pub team" is what it will have to be - and those four fellows are going to have to do the work of eight or 12 or 16 in the years ahead. That's only fair after what the club has done.

O'Sullivan's heart would have sunk when he was named as one of the five managers who took part in the rorts. He would have then grown red with anger when, at the back end of the media conference, Macourt said there was "no evidence" he actually knew of the rorts.

It's just that a deal he did resulted in the club exceeding the cap, Macourt said.

Given that he has been lumped in with three blokes (Matt Hanson, Paul Gregory and Cameron Vale) who have "no place in the club" and another (Brian Waldron) who is "not worth the breath" of even talking about, that seems more than a little unfair on O'Sullivan.

But as they say in Holt Street, "never sue a company that buys newsprint by the tonne".