On Wednesday morning the Canberra Raiders announced prop forward Dane Tilse would be released after Round 7 this year to join Hull KR in the English Super League.
Tilse will be remembered (mostly) fondly by Raiders fans as a great club servant, though few will miss his totally unnecessary and exquisitely poorly timed offloads.
While Tilse was never a game breaker, and indeed only intermittently a starter for Canberra, he was an integral part of the team for the best part of a decade.
Tilse’s most valuable quality in many respects was his durability. He made his debut for the Raiders in Round 6 of 2006, having joined the team from Newcastle after some unpleasantness on a pre-season camp in Bathurst.
He didn’t appear again until Round 15 that year but from that point on Tilse has appeared in 197 of a potential 212 games. The feat of durability included recording at least 21 games in all but one of his eight full seasons, taking his current tally to 201 games, including three at Newcastle.
To put those figures into perspective, only three other current front-row forwards have achieved the 200 game milestone: Willie Mason, Luke Douglas and Brent Kite (James Graham has easily past the milestone if you count his Super League appearances).
That sort of durability is an invaluable asset for a team as they try to construct a roster to withstand the rigours of a 26-round season plus finals – not that finals were a big concern for Tilse, who appeared in only five finals games in his nine seasons.
Tilse is also the longest tenured current Raider after the recent departures of Terry Campese (who he will join in Hull) and Tom Learoyd-Lahrs. Indeed Tilse’s tenure goes back far enough that his first Raiders team included a legend of a bygone era in Jason Croker.
Glen Buttriss will now take on the mantle as longest serving Raider, having debuted in 2008, a season ahead of captain Jarrod Croker.
Tilse’s departure has a number of ramifications for the club. With Brett White retired, Learoyd-Lahrs departed for Melbourne and David Shillington also reportedly on the chopping block, the Raiders are clearly engaged in generational change in the front row (and everywhere else really).
Certainly Shannon Boyd and Paul Vaughan will form some part of the front-row equation and Frank-Paul Nu’uausala is locked in for the next two seasons. However with injuries inevitable in the middle third of the field, the club need at least three or four more credible options to fill out the rotation.
Part of the answer seems to be Josh Papalii. Many Raiders fans wondered why the club was so aggressive last season chasing Kevin Proctor and then reportedly making an offer to Tom Symonds, both right-side second rowers, when they already had Papalii in that position. However the reasoning behind those moves crystallised this year, with Papalii starting all four games in the front row.
Tilse’s departure makes it more and more apparent that the club has always intended to shift Papalii into the front line on a permanent basis. Either that or Papalii’s continued physical expansion forced a re-think of his role on the right edge.
Beyond Papalii, the options within the current squad include forgotten man Mark Nicholls, who made a steady return to the NRL against the Roosters after a two seasons stuck in reserve grade, and journeymen such as Kyle O’Donnell and Luke Page.
There are also a number of options within the youth brigade, with Luke Bateman, Patrick Mago and Tevita Pangai Jr all options. Bateman has generally played lock coming up through the grades, however his physique is not dissimilar to that of Trent Merrin and it isn’t crazy to imagine him in a similar 60-minute undersize prop role.
Mago and Pangai are both boy-mountains and while both are naturally edge backrowers either could be converted to the front row, with Pangai probably the more likely of the two to end up in the middle.
Finally, at the purely reckless speculation end of the spectrum, there are persistent rumours that the club is interested in providing James Tamou with an avenue out of his current mire. However it should be noted that Tamou did show signs of life in Monday’s dramatic come-from-behind win against the Storm, which may influence the Cowboys’ decision on whether to grant a release or re-sign him for 2016 and beyond.
However the Raiders fill the breach, the departure of Tilse (and most likely) Shillington, along with White and Learoyd-Lahrs (and not to forget the earlier departures of fellow big men Troy Thompson, Josh Miller and Scott Logan) will see the end of an era in the front row for the club.
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