If Barrett and the club actually communicated with Tolman with anything like the tone of this article it would be a severely bad day for the club, and I highly doubt they did. Junk journalism at its junkiest.
Tolman deserves to leave our club in a respectful and honoured manner. Not many have pulled on the blue and white as much as he has, and he has consistently worked hard for his team mates game in game out. I'm included in the fans who have a joke about Tolman and the fourth, but I'm only going to joke about it, the vitriol some have for Tolman is daft. As has been said many times on here, if they didn't want it to happen the coach and the halves could change that play. In fact only in the most recent game if you watch Tolman's hitups you will see several times when a teammate is drifting sideways and just hands it off to Tolman when he was back on his heels expecting the play to go elsewhere. He ran it up each time anyway. Something perhaps not pointed out so much is that every team has a middle forward or two whose play the ball they run their plays off of, the half shovels it to them to do a hit up while organising the next play. So when Tolman is gone the likelihood is there will be someone to take his place in doing a hitup and dropping quick in order to try and get a fast play the ball. It is clear that this has been one of his roles in the team, and him going isn't going to remove the need for a forward to run a hitup while the team organises.
In terms of defense, Tolman covers a lot of ground, he has been a key part of our scramble defense, he turns up at places where Ogden and Renouf simply don't. Thompson showed a bit of that against the Buns, so hopefully he can step up that part of his game, but I hope we don't end up missing Tolman's work in defense too much in the next few seasons.