The Young & The Restless Raiders

I understand that blog wise I have – what is the correct terminology here – dropped the ball. This ball dropping extends to all areas of my life. Whatever. Dropping balls is as legitimate a lifestyle as any. Just ask the Raiders.

In the event, I actually blame the Raiders. Who doesn’t.  

The Raiders were the one relationship I trusted to sustain, distract and comfort me in times of uncertainty and I didn’t notice it happening at the time but at some point during the season this relationship took a grievous turn toward near-total apathy so that three months’ worth of incidents and machinations failed to elicit any emotion or response from me at all but seeing the Raiders describe Jarrod Croker as a “flashy” player on Facebook causes me to flip the fuck out.

Setting aside the season-spanning, serialised saga of ceaseless negativity, the Raiders appear to have reached a new juncture in their grim narrative by categorising Croker as a “flashy” player.

This is what they’ve come to. They are so parched of hope and devoid of talent that Croker now rates as a flashy player.

Ye Gods. Because no offence to Jarrod but I register strong objections to this claim. Actually, offence.  

He doesn’t pass, he can’t tackle, and even if you don’t take into account the permanent internal damage that missed kick in 2010 obviously inflicted he still looks like he’s perpetually on the brink of a psychic meltdown and needs his mum.

Here is Croker holding back the beckoning abyss

Leaving aside his undiagnosed and chronic PTSD, the nice – not flashy, nice - thing about Croker is that he has no desire to ever leave Canberra. He is HAPPY in Canberra. He enjoys a FULL AND VIBRANT LIFE in Canberra. He didn’t even want to leave Goulburn to move to Canberra and make grade because the carefully laid out roads alarmed and overwhelmed him. There is something essentially decent about this, especially in light of what has been happening at the Raiders for a long time but was thrown into rude relief this year so that they are now what are referred to in professional media circles as a “problem club”, which is also nice.   

Here is Dugan signing with the Dragons

Of course, the professionals are right, but most of this year’s unpleasant ‘problems’ are representative of a psychological syndrome at the Raiders that I notice has become steadily and now suddenly worse as the years wear on – that of finding Canberra a dissatisfying and dispiriting place to live and play in.

Canberra is not going to change. Young and restless players are going to continue to find themselves trapped in Sartre-like “huis clos” – a “no exit” hell of their own making, and will continue to lose fans and alienate people by seeking or forcing releases.

Here is Blake being bad 

Short of relocating the entire club to Perth I don’t know what can be done about this.  

Performance-wise, the Raiders veer between the passable and the incompetent. Off-field, they have always maintained a relatively calm surface which has been ruptured at obligingly spaced intervals by the sort of scandals that are better understood if you keep a copy of the ACT’s criminal statutes handy and prominent.

The gradual and then sudden unspooling of Todd Carney’s entire Canberra career, Joel Monaghan being blown by a teammate’s dog, Josh Dugan confounding everyone by turning out to be a total dickhead and Blake Ferguson making me so sad I can’t even bring myself to mention him beyond this point on here are some of the more seismic ruptures.

See also:

Coach Furner’s sacking

The senior player revolt that led to Coach Furner’s sacking

Hemorrhaging hundreds of points in a series of huge late season losses

Suffering the most catastrophic loss in club history – Storm 68 Raiders 4

Dropping from a lofty ladder position to one lower than Clint Eastwood’s balls but still higher than the Eels

Papa Josh announcing his plans to join the priesthood

Anthony Milford’s attempts to avoid having to suffer the dreadful corrosive reality of living in Canberra now that people outside of Canberra know his name        

Papa and Milford going rogue and getting on the drink two days before their must win match against the Warriors in Auckland which   

Papa throwing up in their hotel corridor

Letting Sam Williams go and now facing the very real possibility of going from having too many halves to no halves next year

Sandor Earl being awarded the opportunity to explore his capacities for regret, despair and banned substances outside of the NRL  

The death of #Dorguson

Ricky Stuart

Here are Papa and Milford being best friends



Here are Papa's shorts creeping into his crotch 

 

Here is Milford's hair
 

Here is Blake being bae

Here is everyone who has anything to do with the Raiders

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Boyd's Bitchslap, Hayne's Backchat, Campese's Comeback

Can’t keep up? Allow me to bring you up to speed, time-poor peasant.

So. Six rounds down. Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks. You really wouldn’t want to spend much longer than six weeks with Pa Bundren though would you, even if he was your own creation.

·         In league, the 6 week mark is really when you are forced for the first time since season’s start; when you were all flush with that dumb optimism that exists irrespective of reality, to reevaluate your top 8 aspirations. Cowboy fans and the deluded loons who annually espouse their penthouse potential I’m talking to you.

·         Unless you are a Storm, Manly or, god help you, a Rabbit supporter, chances are that your club has already demonstrated a dazzlingly varied array of inadequacies designed to challenge your patience and sanity nearly beyond endurance. Well, endure you must. This is football, and football, like life itself, mostly consists of endurance and suffering.

·         Dave Taylor has been dropped, for reasons that nobody has bothered to make clear. Seemingly, nobody has had to bother because no one cares enough to ask. Those who would normally ask are too busy making off-colour and cruelly unsympathetic cracks about Josh Dugan. I suppose the word is that he has an attitude problem, but saying Dave Taylor has an attitude problem is as obvious and unhelpful as saying the Freemasons have an image problem.

·         Jarryd Hayne is a player operating under conditions of severe personal stress. He offsets this by engaging weekly in vigorous and one sided dialogues with referees. Sometimes he takes a few minutes time out in between bouts and plays a bit of football. The Eels are locked several years deep into their slow and untidy spiral of decline now, and the strain is showing.

·         Ricky Stuart is operating under some stress too. All coaches do, of course, but not all coaches front post-game press conferences with the brimstone of a southern Baptist preacher and not all coaches care enough to make a $10 000 investment in the future of the game which is going straight to hell as they see it.

·         Darius Boyd gave another arresting press conference. In it, he gave nothing away to the assembled media other than the one thing they already knew from years prior, which was that they were dealing with a halfwit who was still not even remotely acquainted with proper press conference etiquette. Far be it from me to dish out unauthorised psychiatric diagnoses but he does seem to have advanced several shades up the spectrum since becoming a Knight.  

·         Misery continues to seep through Ben Barba’s barely maintained façade. There’s an ocean breaking inside the poor boy’s brain. You can see the tide washing in and out of his eyes. Barba was last year’s excitement machine. Josh Dugan was once an excitement machine. The game is littered with broke-down excitement machines. It’s a veritable Somme, and very sad.

·         Terry Campese finally made his comeback. This just leaves us waiting on Jesus now. Of course, the thing about comebacks (and this is where Terry went wrong last year) is that you are expected to come back and stay back. It’s not compulsory, but it is the preferred method.  Seven minutes of flabby play does not a comeback make, although as exits go it was spectacular, in a tragic Shakespearean way. Raider fans, who are well accustomed to pain and tragedy, absorbed the psychic pain with trademark weary stoicism facilitated by extra lashings of class A narcotics.

·         Recently, the Raiders have overcome trying circumstances to win 2 games. In a row. I believe this is what hubris-bloated commentators officially refer to as “a roll”. The other week against the Roosters, when the Raiders finally, after 45 profoundly painful minutes of play, completed a full set of six, Brandy Alexander called that “a roll” too. Raiders. Severely lowering standards since the mid-90s.

·         Sonny Bill is back too. I find it hard to summon interest in someone who seems to be so solely committed to self-interest, but he has rendered the Roosters vaguely watchable, which is not a sentence I thought I would write in Braith Anasta’s absence. 

·         Paul Gal was supposed to hang his junk out for charity. He arranged his underpants into some sort of crudely fashioned G-string instead. The whole this was a touch underwhelming. As in, I wasn’t all like:

·         Finally, there’s Todd Carney to consider. Because I haven’t, for fucking ever. I realised this a couple of weeks ago. I made a note of it.

 

Look at that unmarked neck and chest flesh. This is so sad. Lest we forget.   

Todd Carney - Never Trust a Tea-Drinking Man

Around this time in the afternoon before Origin 2 a few weeks ago Ricky Stuart and Todd Carney sat down and had a cup of tea together.

I really have no further comments. Well, I have one, and it is that I DON’T TRUST A TEA-DRINKING MAN. But, whatever. I don’t entirely trust the Blues to get the job done tonight either, but that may just be me transferring my festering sense of inadequacy elsewhere.

Speaking of, my brother is unconvinced that Carney is a big-game player. He also believes he has some obvious and severe mental issues. This is unwarranted. Look at these photos. They are enough for me to put aside my distaste for men - no - footballers who drink tea, and they should absolutely put to rest any concerns about Carney’s mental regularity. No one with a slipped mind or a deficiency in self-belief would wear lycra leggings with this much panache. Unless of course they were so far gone that they no longer knew what they were wearing, which is not the case and god-willing will never be the case.  

No, these leggings announce two things:

-Don’t fuck with me, &

-Who gives a shit?

This is really everything you can ask of your clothes.

In any case, now is not the time to question Carney’s grasp on reality. Now is the time to say GO SON. GO FORTH AND BE FABULOUS.

The Raiders Dragons Hoodoo

On Monday night the bus carrying a full load of Red-V fans to Canberra clapped out in Goulburn. I was an unenthusiastic about this match as I have ever been, about anything, ever, until I heard this news right before kickoff and became inexplicably animated and highly excited. Something about hearing that the opposition supporters were in a pickle (and in Goulburn, which is really one and the same) fired my core. I don’t know if this was a possible side effect of my unprocessed rage toward the world or what, but it carried me about fifty minutes through the game.  The Dragon supporters arrived fifteen minutes before the end, just as the Dragons had pulled ahead 18-16 and looked certain to win. They immediately started making a lot of noise and waving their sophisticated and witty signs around and being fucking annoying and making me think murderous hateful thoughts that originated with them but extended rapidly to the whole damn world.

I’m not blowing any minds by saying that Bruce stadium is no longer the fortress it once was. Teams used to dread playing in Canberra. Ricky Stuart used to make it his personal responsibility before games to stand in the car park and meet visiting teams as they disembarked from their bus, raining threats and curses and making menacing comments about the cold and the unfortunate effects he foresaw it having on their game.  

These days are gone, of course. Today, all that remains is the air of a fairground’s faded loveliness.

The air of faded loveliness extends as far as the playing group, but not as far as the coach. Coach Furner’s incompetence is not charming or raffish. It’s just incredibly, incredibly annoying. He does not warrant the sepia-tinged splendor that the Raiders name and history bestows. The bell tolls for thee Furner: consignment to oblivion awaits.  

The faded glory thing is nice. Not necessarily useful in any practical sense, but nice nonetheless. The vice-like grip we have the Dragons in is another thing entirely. It is psychologically satisfying in a very deep sense, yes, but it is also the best and most enduring oddity in the NRL.

The fact that it is the Raiders who are the keepers of the game’s greatest hoodoo just enhances the highly improbable and excellent nature of the whole mystifying thing. I mean, any old team can just beat other teams indiscriminately and at will through hard work and good completion rates. It takes truly a strange and enigmatic a team to uphold a hoodoo as potent as this.

This hoodoo is the greatest mystery of the modern game. It is the NRL equivalent of the giant squids with eyes the size of dinner plates. It is the elusive thing that saw Sam Williams do some nifty stuff in the 78^th minute to get Reece Robinson over for a try to snatch the game back from the Dragons. It is the same thing that saw Josh Dugan slam down that audacious 80^th minute try off a short kick-off last year that won the game. It is the same thing that has kept the Dragons winless at Bruce Stadium for the last twelve years, and has kept that fossil Matt Cooper from ever beating the Raiders anywhere. It’s awesome. It's ours. Long may it endure.

"CARN(ey) THE BLUES"

Blues! Finding it difficult to conjure up the requisite levels of State of Origin based excitement? Feeling like the whole thing will almost inevitably end up resembling a nightmare suffered after eating too much cheese? Already anticipating sitting in steely silence and staring into the middle distance while Queenslanders with demeanors that announce “I am on my way to rob a convenience store” and lesions that announce “I am also a crabs carrier” crow about passion and pride while meantime Michael Jennings is advised to seek work on a road gang? Me too.

These are unpromising circumstances for NSW. They are about as unpromising a circumstance as one could find oneself in.

Despite this, come Wednesday night I will no doubt be all up in game one’s business, and you know why? AS A DOG RETURNETH TO HIS VOMIT, SO A FOOL RETURNETH TO HIS FOLLY – proverbs 26, 11. It’s true. When it comes to Origin the Bible knows what is UP.

Ricky Stuart GOD LOVE HIM has been making his usual fairly spectacular and increasingly apocalyptic comments regarding New South Wales having no option other than to win this series OR ELSE. Yes, well spotted, Ricky, we are now at the “or else” part of the scenario.



Buffalo Bill - also familiar with the "or else" part of fraught scenarios.



Sam Thaiday made some crack to TV cameras about the buffet being their biggest problem during camp, the subtext being that the Maroons are such a finely tuned and highly functional team that lavish quantities of food being digested and pushed through coils of bowel is their primary occupation and concern throughout Origin camp. Maddeningly, the Blues are not in a strong position to argue against this belief.

Still, there is the very real possibility that Thaiday was just overwhelmed at being confronted, while dining, with menus that aren’t laminated and don’t have photographs of the food on it.  

Hopefully - and I say this with a sizeable serving of skepticism - the Blues are cultivating other, more impressive ways of spending their time. Like, say, figuring out how to shut down the unnatural might of Queensland’s right side-loving combination of Smith, Slater and Cronk. That’d be nice.  

As it is, I can barely bring myself to think about those three. JT either. Well, maybe JT a little, but only because he is a man of sleek allure with powerful loins and an idiot’s laugh, and if you look closely you will see that he sometimes bears fabulous, fleeting resemblance to Nick Nolte’s mug shot.

I just kind of feel like Origin is going to be some sort of Discovery Channel nature-based nightmare. Hyenas tearing open a gazelle carcass and the like. I saw something on life under the sea recently. I thought: “this is a lifestyle worth thinking about”. Take cleaning stations, for example. Apparently, these are a common feature of undersea life, places where large fish pull in to be nibbled at by smaller fish for the purposes of health and hygiene for the big fish and dinner for the little fish. Maybe Origin will be something like that, only with a bit more ultra-violence?

Oh, my God. My mind is choosing to think about obscure aquatic social customs rather than, say, the broiling majesty of Cameron Smith with his deep, concentrated, Sphinx-like intensity and hairy bunyip-like body. It’s self-preservation. The alternative is being besieged by a debilitating bout of neurosis and inhaling raw cookie dough.

Praise the Daily Telegraph then and their slew of redemptive, Todd Carney rebooted stories. “CARN THE BLUES!”, “The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall and Rise Again of Todd Carney”, etc. Right now these stories, along with my orphan lambs BooBoo and BabyCakes demanding milk, are essentially my reason for getting out of bed in the morning.

Is it just me or does he seem like the loveliest and most sweetly-natured person who is purported to have an ‘image problem’ ever? I ask you! When I take over the world (note the ‘when’ there, not ‘if’) I will redress the criteria for all this ‘image problem’ shit, and those afflicted with an affiliation to liquor of the malt variety and a propensity for setting fire to the nutsacks of close friends will rise to the top. Like cream. Just you wait. In the meantime, I understand (just barely) that some people are not fans of menfolk like Todd Carney or Tommy Lee – men who don’t subscribe to the notion that laws are supposed to apply to all people equally. Whatever. Plenty of Robbie Farah/Buster Bluth from Arrested Development types to go round for the likes of them.