Canberra Raiders 2014: Die Harder

My friend supports the Broncos. This automatically renders him incapable of understanding the slaughterhouse of the soul struggle of supporting a second-tier team. He is also a Queenslander. Frankly, seeing these sentiments strung together on a screen like this is making me question how we are friends at all. Thin ice!

Anyways, because no discussion of the Raiders is complete without reference to the astonishingly innovative ways in which they hemorrhage young talent, and because I still look back on said hemorrhaged talent with a honey-glazed glow I guess I was moaning some wretched sentiment regarding Carney or Monaghan or Ferguson or possibly, depending on the extent to which he had already inflamed me with his airy upper-echelon assuredness, Travis Waddell. I can’t remember the details exactly. It was only two days ago but my mind has a tendency to slip a gear when it comes to the Raiders. Mental health experts would have me believe that this, much like my night terrors, is a side effect from suffering under the sustained weight of terminal failure and disappointment.

 ‘Oh,’ he said, with the inane breeziness common to breakfast TV presenters, ‘you should be used to it by now.’ Of course, this is exactly the type of innately annoying and unsympathetic thing a Bronco supporter would say. Storm fans too, tenfold. The Gina Reinharts of the NRL. Totally out of touch.

Anyway. I told him it never stops hurting. Because it doesn’t. But I enjoyed the sound and sensation of saying something as arresting as this so I added an apocalyptic, cinema-trailer-narrator-type element to my delivery – IT NEVER. STOPS. HURTING.  

Because just like life in general, there is always another punishment, another casual outrage, another loss.
Well, so what. We die harder.

 

The Raiders Rattle The Storm.

The inner flutterings of my intuition told me the Raiders were going to win this game. I texted my brother, I told him “I predict an upset, same as last year!” “Not me” he wrote back. My hold on the real world has always been slight at best, but something tells me I am right and he is wrong and I serenely ignore his suggestion, and everyone else’s (except, I imagine, the lovely and ever-loyal Laurie Daley) that the Raiders will be badly beaten.

The game starts but I am making custard in the kitchen. I don’t know what I miss but it probably involves Cooper Cronk rushing around being authoritative and yappy.

Raiders post the first points, ten minutes in. Blake Ferguson does sensational athletic things under the high ball, comes up with it, slams it down, leaps up and slams the ball away. Huzzah. Croker converts. 6-0.

Ferguson is playing with two spectacular black eyes. I note with interest that he has never looked better. He looks less like a half-formed amphibian and more Tyler Durden.

Reece Robinson gets a ball to Sandor Earl and Earl gets over. It’s pronounced “Shannnndor”. Is that Celtic? Those stars on his thighs don’t look very Celtic. I remember sitting in Bruce Stadium in 2010, when he was on the wing for Penrith, staring at that star-spangled thigh and thinking it was one of the more horrendous assemblages of tattoos I had seen. This was back when Joel Monaghan was on the wing for the Raiders. It was a good time, 2010. You sat right down close to the sideline so you could hear the hits and the things that people called out to Monaghan – nice things, because Monaghan was nice – and often Monaghan, because he was right there, would turn and look and acknowledge the shout-out. Usually it was just “HEY MONAGHS!!!” but once it was “HEY MONAGHS YOU’RE A FUNNY FUCK!!” which was astute, because he was, and didn’t that sense of humour prove to be his ultimate undoing - which, as the (my) theory goes, marked the general decline in morale and cohesion at the Raiders, the results of which we are still seeing, circa 2012. But I digress.

Cameras cut to Mal Meninga sitting broodily in some lofty box. The commentators announce he has been in the Raiders dressing rooms. Doing what, I wonder? I have no time and no appetite for Mal Meninga. I would rather hear that Ricky Stuart had been in the dressing room, frankly. Croker’s conversion fails; he sends a large lump of grass a good way up into the air though. 10-0.

Play resumes and Croker gets a flick-pass away. Several seconds later Brandy Alexander says words to the effect of “Croker raced up and made first contact.” This is all very, very strange. Unfamiliar.

Fifteen minutes in the Storm get their first real chance to post points. The Storm post points. This, this is familiar. Momentum shifts and swings towards the Storm. Doom-tinged doubt creeps in to my mind. This is exactly what these Raiders cannot handle. Defensive tests unnerve them, they unravel. Earl, who has just been tossed into touch a moment prior, gets up out of the line to shut things down for Melbourne on the fifth. I exhale. Relief. After defending their own line Canberra have a good set of six. My god. Also, they’re offloading. I’ve never seen the Raiders offload en masse like this. Twenty five minutes in and their completion rate is 9 from 10. My god in heaven.

The Storm make an error. Reece Robinson passes long to Eddrick Lee, who juggles, re-gathers and crosses for a try in the corner. Croker, gaping like a hooked fish, misses by a mile. 14-6.

Next thing, while I’m occupying myself wondering whether the Raiders can get through a solid set after posting points, they are occupying themselves by immediately going ahead and posting some more points. Quick hands from Josh McCrone to Ferguson, who busts a tackle, fends like T-Rex and links with Earl – TRY!

Next, Anthony Quinn knees Ferguson in the head. It flattens him. Eventually he wobbles to his feet.

In the 39^th minute Justin O’Neil gets a second try for the Storm, on Canberra’s left side. The problem side. Fun fact that is really no fun at all: Canberra has conceded 34 tries through their left hand side this year. Their left hand side defense gapes like a ripped circus tent, basically.

Halftime, 20-12. As they run off Mark Gasnier looms up and opines of Canberra “they’re actually doing a Melbourne Storm on the Melbourne Storm!” He gets this out without fucking it up and is clearly very pleased with himself. It still astonishes me that anyone would give Mark Gasnier a microphone, but at this time I’m feeling generous and find myself murmuring something like “good on you Gaz”, which is neither a sentence nor a sentiment I am familiar with. This is an unusual night all round.

Still, I’m not comfortable. To be a Raiders fan is to be in a perpetual state of discomfort. They can’t be trusted. They are famously unreliable. Also, the Storm are irritatingly reliable. And they love a strong second half. I picture them in the dressing room, being re-programmed with Bellamy’s exclusive and secret ‘retreat, evaluate, recalibrate’ software. The thought makes me feel extremely edgy.

The second half starts. A ball from McCrone leaves the Storm looking a long way short in defense and gets Eddrick Lee over for his second try. Lee was on track to becoming a basketball superstar until advice from an uncle swayed him towards football. He’s fucking massive; a big, lanky, loose assemblage of limbs and circuitry. Croker misses the conversion. No offence, but can’t someone else do it? Actually, offence. He stinks. 24-12.

Cronk kicks a 40/20. This is not good. This is very, very bad.

The Raiders hold the Storm back, but only barely. They get the ball back and advance it up the field with an ease and aptitude that I have never seen.

With 56 minutes gone Croker scores a try from a Joel Thompson one-arm offload, much to the distress of Cronk, who is screaming maniacally at Strom players to slide across, slide across! The Storm are ruffled! Less surprisingly, so is the terminally inept Mark Gasnier. He interjects to observe that “three repeat sex – pardon me – sets - for the Raiders here…” I get up to light some incense.

Next, McCrone throws a long looping ball out to Earl. Another try! Another missed conversion.

Shaun Fensom makes a bust and sets off down the field like a great thundering bison.

Robinson gets a ball to Lee, who makes it a hat trick of tries, which in turn makes a lump form in my throat. Croker, who looks like he has a perpetual lump in his throat, makes the conversion. This takes it to 40-12, the largest margin the Storm have ever been beaten by at AAMI Park. Audacious. We really have no business beating the Storm at all, let alone at their home ground, and by a record breaking margin. I relax and begin to revel in this unaccustomed brilliance.

The siren goes. David Furner winks at some unseen person from the coaching box. Such is my mood that I find this rakishly charming. Alluring, even. Winning throws a golden glow over what would otherwise be a sleazy and lowbrow gesture from a man as flinty as Furner. Ferguson and Earl do a special handshake, one with twitching fingers and pumping motions. This is also charming.

Gasnier, chatting amiably to a peevish Jason Ryles, says that the Storm were ‘uncharacteristical.’ This is not the first time I have heard Gasnier use this non-word. I can’t help but feel that the leap from leaving an absurdist 4 a.m. voicemail message to sideline commentary has been something of a stretch for Gasnier. He is far better suited to the former, I feel. I’m no expert, but surely that must be the greatest voicemail message in Australian history. The flashes of lewd, Wild-like wit are unparalleled in their excellence.

Finally, cameras cut to the Raiders dressing sheds. They’re all in a big circle clapping and hoo-haa-ing and belting out the team song and then Eddrick Lee breaks ranks, moves into the centre of the circle, drops to the floor and STARTS DOING THE WORM.

Des Hasler Giving Me A Nose Bleed

Y'all better get ahold of your socks because I'm about to knock them off. This Manly shitfight, and the Des Hasler defecting to the Dogs thing? I am bereft of opinion*. Interest, too. I know. I can scarcely believe it myself.

Occasionally I have found my mind drifting idly toward the topic, but it tends to skip right over the Manly boardroom bit and settles instead on Michael Ennis. As in I start wondering what Michael Ennis makes of all this fuckery. I know the answer. He'd be fucking loving it. If anyone has a keen understanding and appreciation of primordal psychological warfare it is Michael Ennis. Bitch RESEARCHES the lives and backgrounds of players from opposing teams so as to be able to sledge them to the best of his already impressive ability. That is some shark-like gusto right there. Respect. By the by, did anyone notice how much street talk was thrown about in the 2011 season? Everyone started talking street, myself included. Exhibit A: Tim Sheens saying 'respect'. As in: "I'm really impressed with what the Storm acheive - respect." Well, I found this extremely odd. That's all I'm saying.

Deep though my respect is for Ennis and his special kind of glowering, insane resolve, I feel mild envy bordering on wild jealousy when I think of his club's culture. I mean, Jesus Christ. One minute they're embroiled in the Coffs Harbour rape scandal and the next they've got the shrewdest CEO in the league rebuilding on every level and orchestrating the coach-poach of the century, what the shit?? What the shit, yes, and also word to the Raiders, what's your excuse?! A dog blew Joel Monaghan and the photo was a social media sensation the world over - where are the reverberations and instigations of positive change from that crisis? Leave it to the Canberra club to not make an occassion of such an unfortunate incident. That's just typical of the whole flaccid and lacklustre place. It's a monument masquerading as a city. My mother just visited me. She recounted a small altercation she had with a man from Canberra on the beach in Jervis Bay recently who, as well as being something of a dickhead, was also a self-proclaimed dog whisperer who suggested in a pompous and condescending fashion that she bring her crippled whippet up to Canberra for some 'treatment'. "Oh no," she said, (with her usual force and conviction, I imagine) "I'm not going to that place. Horrible. My daughter lived there last year and had a total breakdown and as soon as she moved away she made a complete recovery - forget it." Isn't that just the last word in excellence? For all her early flirtation with senility she still has some serious form. Respect.

Where was I? Oh, right, Des Hasler. So I saw him in his new blue and white Bulldogs training shirt and found it a jarring and unsettling and altogether satisfying sight.

And then, because I am highly skilled in the art of relating everything no matter how obscure to the Raiders, I immediately thought of how jarring and unsettling and altogether unsatisfactory it will be to see Josh Dugan in a different coloured shirt when that terrible day comes. A non-lime green shirt. My god. I call this 'Looking Into The Face of Something Horrible'. It is an undertaking I try to avoid. Something else I try to avoid is anything pertaining even loosely to Brett Stewart; unless of course it affords me opportunities to bitch extravagantly about him. I thought that the talk about him exercising his Des Hasler get-out clause for 2012 would grant me this opportunity but DAMNATION the sulky bitch will be remaining at Brookvale until the end of 2014. Apparently. As Dessie just demonstrated with superb rat-like cunning, things change. And as the slippery-as-a-greased-pig Tim Moltzen proved, contracts and signings don't mean a goddamned thing. It is my Christmas wish that 2012 is the year of Brett Stewart's ultimate undoing. He's already out on the ledge. Some small episode, coupled with the fact that his mind is already snagged on the belief that the NRL and the wider world have fatally wronged him, could well combine to ensure his slow descent into hysterical paranoia kicks into overdrive and leads to full-throttle implosion. I know, I know. I do occassionally have the urge to perform acts of anarchic subversion. More common, though, is the urge to see Brett Stewart suffer in his jocks. I tend to go with my neuroses and prejudices because they stay solid when everything else is as shaky as my mother's trifle. Crumbs of comfort and such.

So, yeah, UP THE DOGS. I find it strange to be condoning the Dogs, I really do. Still, it's like Best and Less. It's not that there's anything wrong with Best and Less per se, it's the customers. With the Bulldogs it's the fans. They're grotesque. Look into a Bulldogs crowd. It looks for all the world like some very large mission or asylum has just turned everyone out for the day. I love this, of course. Also, I envy them their deranged ugly fanaticism, expecially when it intensifies to fever pitch, which is pretty much their restive state. "Unfortunately, I can't remember a thing about the game. But the police told me I had quite a good time" - words every Bulldog fan worth their salt has said on at least one occassion. L'adore.

........I wrote this and then I went to sleep and had a dream about Des Hasler. I sat next to him on a team bus and we spoke in low intense voices about important and high-risk coaching strategies which have unhelpfully eluded me upon waking. I do remember that he was seething with raw intensity and barely leashed rage. Like Brando as Stanley Kowalski, only less surly and more savvy. His eyes were kinder too. But only just. He was so intense that I got a nosebleed and had to swap seats with Steve Matai. What a guy. What a dream. What a game. Goddamn.


*Over the course of writing this my perceived lack of position on the matter has proceeded through a series of well-worn phases - hating on Brett Stewart, loving on Michael Ennis and fretting for the Raiders -  which have all restored in me the reassuring sense that I am in charge of things**.


**Which I'm really not.

Soz, Bro....A Public Apology to Josh McCrone

Raiders! Their win on the weekend over the hapless Eels! I loved it, of course, but since then I've been too deeply immersed in Trick My Truck and Teen Mom 2 to string together anything much in terms of a comprehensive Victory Post. That will come next week after we play the Roosters, although realistically I could get it out of the way now because the writing is already all over the wall for that game. Sorry, Roosters, but I mean, honestly. You suck right now.

Let's leave it to Steven Kearney and his typically neat and succinct post-game summation when he simply said his Eels were "out-enthused". To this I nodded my assent and said, also neatly and succinctly, "damn straight, Kearney". By the way, he is a good looking Polynesian man, yeh? Yeh, I thought so.

Now. Turning to more important matters and the purpose of this post - what I really want to do is extend an olive branch, a live dove held in a white glove and a formal apology to Josh McCrone for the insults and abuse I heaped on him last year. Sorry, bro. Really. I apologise. Last year was rough on all of us.

What's more; and not meaning to deflect here, but I think the entire Raiders organisation also owes the kid an apology, and probably a nice apartment over Belconnen way too. Or a speedboat, in which case they should seek Greg Inglis' expert council. Call it compensation for what I imagine was a harrowing  and self-esteem shaking pre-season. In case you've forgotten, Terry Campese went down with an epic injury, Canberra was left with a gaping hole in their halves and Matt Orford was duly hustled in from the English wilderness and signed at considerable cost and to considerable fanfare before proving to be the dud buy of the 2011 season. What all this pre-season panic meant for McCrone was that a general lack of faith was shown in his ability to be at all effective in the halves.

I guess the fact that he actually was largely ineffectual in the halves had something to do with Furner's lack of faith, but I can't help but think that this was a fundamental coaching error. And yes, I am aware that coming from me this is an entirely hypocritical line of thought, given that I spent last season hating on him with the fervor of a flinty-eyed religious zealot. and followed the fight to sign Orford with breathless anticipation.

I mean, it's not like I egged his house or left burning bags of dogshit on his doorstep - try as I might I could never get a hold of his address - but I heaped hate on the boy like there was no tomorrow.Thing was, he was playing poxy football and I took a personal and somewhat irrational dislike to him. This sort of thing does happen. You could call it passion, I suppose, but there comes a point where it's easier and more accurate to just call it prejudice.

This descent from passion into prejudice was demonstrated when the Joel Monaghan With Dog scandal broke late last year. I heard the hijinks took place at a player by the name of Josh's house and immediately broke into an Iago-esque soliloquy damning Josh McCrone to the seventh circle of hell for  - obviously - masterminding such a stunt, and fuming, furthermore, that wasn't he just the type to have an eager to please golden retriever / yellow lab (the picture was inconclusive, remember) as a pet?

miss you Monaghs, not the same without you boo..

Never mind the fact that it was actually Josh Miller's house, no, never mind that at all. I mean, you can see how those Salem witch trials got ever so slightly out of hand can't you? All it takes is someone (me, say) to not like the cut of someone else's jib (McCrone's, in this instance, although he's not Robinson Crusoe here, trust) and all sorts of expansive and imaginative ideas take root in the skull and come to fruition with alarming force.

Anyway, not to put too finer point on it but his game really was as ordinary as unbuttered toast last year, and even though he got better as the year wore on the damage was fone and the die was cast.

When my brother came from Sydney to see Alan Tongue's 200th game with me McCrone made some characteristically foolish mistake and either he or his girlfriend, both of whom it has to be said are in possession of robust 'outside' voices, hollered in response "HE CAN'T SEE - HIS EYES ARE TOO CLOSE TOGETHER". I think they followed this up with some comments  of a more general nature, i.e. comparing him to a cyclops.


Still on them, somewhat inexplicably they had wound up sitting in the Chook Pen - both wearing sets of huge gold viking horns - at a Roosters Raiders match a few weeks prior and had reported gleefully that some repellant bogan-ette behind them (my brother thinks Roosters fans are the ugliest and most altogether abhorrent fans in the entire league, by the way - "They're not even FUNNY-FUCKED like Bulldog fans, they're just FUCKED") had spent most of the game screeching "SUCK-SHIT MOTHERFUHHHHHHCKERSSSSS!" at the Raiders, basically on their every play. Impressed, he brought this heckle with him down the Hume and employed it liberally in showing his appreciation of the Cowboys' cock-ups. Of which there were many. Bruce was a veritable slaughterhouse that night. A slaughterhouse with Willie Mason as overseer. Awesome.

Anyway, so McCrone's eyes are close togather. All football players have their crosses to bear. Just as Josh Dugan has to contend with being ridiculously, inexplicably good looking and Cameron Smith has to (or should) shave his shoulders twice daily, (see exhibits A and B below) so too must Josh McCrone deal with looking like some kind of cyclops. Who cares?

 

I can afford to be cavalier now given his remarkable and revelatory surge in form this season - who knew he had it in him; other than Joey, of course, who spent most of last year simultaneously training him and talking him up? Now? Word to opposing teams: Give the boy a mere touch of the ball or an inch of space at your peril! How many linebreaks did he make against the Eels, about a dozen? Amazing. And how well does he partner with Sam the-best-thing-out-of-Cooma Williams? Also, it seems hardly possible, but he looks to be even swifter and nippier than last year, and, best of all, he conducted a post-game interview while wearing a mouthguard. Respect.

Yes, I am impressed and humbled, well spotted.

Remorsefully  and respectfully apologetic, too; so here's to you, Mr. McCrone - may the wind always be at your back, and may bitches such as myself never breathe a cruel word in your direction again.