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As a Melbourne Storm side motivated by Cooper Cronk’s mid-90s Paul Harragon haircut scored try after try against a hapless Canberra Raiders outfit I have to ask:
Is it ever really OK to lose an NRL match by 50 points?
Eagle-eyed viewers will actually point out that the malfunctioning Green Machine actually lost by a nauseating sixty-four points, a figure that would even have the city’s occasional AFL team blushing Kevin Sheedy-crimson.
Hell, it could have been even worse, with Melbourne missing a few late chances and a Cameron Smith field goal just to prove that deep down even the most responsible footy player has a sniggering schoolboy sense of humour.
However, for the sake of keeping things simple, let’s just set the bar at 50.
Fifty, the big five-oh dear.
It’s an awful lot of points to get done by in a rugby league match.
When I was playing under 18’s many moons ago my coach boldly promised to do a nude lap of the lower footy fields if we ever reached the magical number, which he duly did one windy Tuesday afternoon after a big win much to our amusement and the confusion of Katie McKenzie who was walking her labrador past at the time.
Watching a team of full-time professional athletes get so hopelessly outclassed is much the same as seeing your usually stern middle-aged mentor bolting around in the buff; it’s equal parts hilarious and horrifying.
It all started so innocently yesterday for Canberra, but by the end of the match they may as well have painted themselves fluoro yellow and stood still like the world’s stockiest agility poles, such was the brilliance of the Storm’s attack.
But is the other team playing really an acceptable excuse to lose by fifty plus? I don’t think so.
It’s the NRL: teams are supposed to play well. Other excuses I also won’t swallow are “We didn’t show up” or “They just got a roll-on early” or “But we had a great week at training!”
No no and double no. These will not cut it, especially if you’re playing at home and the opposition five-eighth is a bloke you shunted over a decade ago.
I think most NRL fans can potentially, possibly stomach a fifty turd-burger maybe once every decade. But, and this is a but that makes Dave Taylor’s look like Kylie Minogue’s, the circumstances most be so exceptional as to warrant a potential X-Files plot line.
As I see it the only possible excuses for losing by fifty or more in the National Rugby League are:
– Paul Keating gave the pre-match pep talk;
– Tony Abbott gave the pre-match pep talk;
– The entire team went for after-dinner icecreams at the Coogee Bay Hotel the night before;
– Ben Roberts is playing five-eighth and has been instructed to handle the ball more.
Unless any of the above happen this year, and I guess they’re all possible (bar maybe the Ben Roberts thing), as a rugby league fan I think it’s reasonable to expect that no professional rugby league team playing at the highest level is beaten by a half century.
If only for the sake of poor old Craig Bellamy being forced to get around a muddy Goschs paddock in the raw on a chilly Monday morning.
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