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Poor St George Illawarra. Whatever confidence they’ve got left – and it might be pushing it to suggest there could be any left at all – will probably disappear at the hands of Brisbane on Thursday night.
A few clubs have complained about the competition draw being tough on them during the early rounds, with five-day turnarounds between games and the like, but has anyone done it as tough as the Dragons are doing it this week?
On Saturday night they played premiers North Queensland at 1300SMILES Stadium and were blown away 36-0. On Thursday night they face Brisbane, the team the Cowboys beat in golden point extra-time to win last year’s grand final, at Suncorp Stadium.
That is surely the five-day turnaround to end all five-day turnarounds – and with both games away from home.
The Dragons elected to stay in Queensland for the time between the two games rather than fly home to Sydney from Townsville on Sunday and back up to Brisbane on Tuesday, which should help with the rest and recuperation factors as opposed to having two travelling days so close together.
But will sticking around in the Sunshine State be any good for their mental health? Being away from the distractions they would have in their normal lives at home just gives the players more time to think of how the Cowboys smashed them and how they now have to play the Broncos.
It’s a bit like a racehorse going up against Winx one week and Chautauqua the next, except the horse doesn’t know it’s getting its brains kicked in by another horse.
I know horse trainers think the better horses know they’re in a race and where the finishing post is and all of that, but most of them just think they’re running around with a bunch of other horses, don’t they?
Unfortunately for the Dragons, unless they’ve got mystical powers that enable them to eliminate the thought of anything negative that happened in the last few days, they will be thinking of the job North Queensland did on them.
And while these are professional footballers we’re talking about and after one game is finished they’re supposed to immediately start focusing on the next and concentrate on what they must do right to help get a win, they’re only human.
Surely at least some of them will have concerns pop into their head about what might happen against the Broncos.
As the score obviously suggests, St George Illawarra were poor against North Queensland.
If you had watched the game without any knowledge of the results from the first four rounds, you would have easily been forgiven for thinking the Dragons were winless going into the game.
But they went in with an even record of two wins and two losses. The two wins came in rounds three and four, so they were chasing a winning treble in Townsville.
What a fall back to earth the result must have felt like to them.
Brisbane weren’t nearly as dominant in beating Gold Coast on Friday as the Cowboys were against the Dragons, but it was a different type of game. The Titans had played pretty well overall in the first four rounds, winning three games and losing one, and were playing at home.
Good luck to Dragons coach Paul McGregor, trying to find a way to get his team into the game against Brisbane. He’ll impress the importance of defence and respecting possession as the first means of getting back on track, but the horrible truth is the Dragons have got very little in attack.
They have scored an embarrassingly low total of 40 points in the first five rounds and playmaker Benji Marshall, a superstar of times gone by at Wests Tigers, was poor against the Cowboys. Marshall is in the twilight of his career and struggling to attract offers for next season.
It’s only natural to think Brisbane are going to inflict more pain on Marshall and his teammates. How badly would it affect the Dragons if they copped back-to-back floggings from the two biggest guns in the competition?
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