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Rugby league’s preseason is great and I have always loved it.
My mindset right now in my first Roar column of the year is: piss off, cricket and tennis. We leaguies will tolerate you for a month or so, but in the coming year – our season – there are much bigger fish to fry.
For every fan, plenty has happened since the previous year’s grand final, and the anticipation for the coming NRL season never fails to stir and excite me.
Seemingly, everyone’s team is looking bigger, better, faster, stronger, smarter, and so on.
And so it should on the 13th day of January, after an off-season which must have included an influx of exciting new talent, players’ surgery to correct some physical wrongs, and a fitness regime that is unquestionably the ‘best ever’ for the club concerned.
I bumped into an absolutely crazy Parramatta fan a couple of days ago and the preseason excitement was way, way out of control. I was in – of all places – Port Macquarie, but ‘Pirtek’ Pete Doherty’s personal Richter about the new-look Parra read 9.5.
Why? I asked.
“Kieran Foran looks absolutely fantastic,” said Pirtek Pete, the greatest advertisement I’ve ever seen for the blue-and-gold cause.
“And you should see how the Semi-Trailer [Semi Radradra] looks! Never better. I reckon he’ll score 25, maybe 30 tries this year. He looks absolutely awesome.
“We’ll be right up there with the best, no risk. For the mighty Eels, this could be a season to remember.”
Pirtek Pete was absolutely convinced that his beloved Eels are heading for a monumental season, so I asked how he knew they looked so damn good.
“I saw their session on the internet mate,” he said.
“Never looked so quick and slick. They’ll go really well. No risk about it.”
Ah, right. The internet. Of course! But this bloke was in his mid-50s, pushing 60. I looked in his driveway. There was a 4WD there with a bunch of Parramatta stickers adorning the rear window.
So I checked out his man-shed. Yep, this guy was blue and gold from top to toe. Parra-phernalia everywhere I looked.
Thinking about the Parramatta 2016 roster, I surmised: “Geez, season 2016 could be one for Parra to savour forever.”
Sincerely, I would like to see that.
Rugby league got an exciting infusion when the North Queensland Cowboys won last year’s comp with that golden-point thriller. The Cowboys played an exhilarating, never-say-die brand of footy to snare the code’s Holy Grail at Homebush.
That amazing, one-point win triggered the most sumptuous feast for a hungry rugby league community.
Honestly, I am not convinced that 2016 will do the same for Pirtek Pete from Port Macquarie. But this is the preseason and the Eels are looking pretty good. At least on blue and gold paper.
And I would love Brad Arthur’s boys to go the whole hog and do it for the blue and gold faithful for the first time in a beautifully neat 30 years.
Go Parra. Do it for yourselves, do it for your district. And do it for Pirtek Pete Doherty, one of the most ardent supporters I have ever met.
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