- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Waiting for Canberra to fulfil their dangerous potential is like waiting for Pizza Hut to deliver a Bigfoot supreme you ordered in 1995. Except for a few minor differences.
Even though you placed the order in your teens, and even though it’s now a discontinued product, your piping-cold serve of the Hut’s one-time fad slab of trans-fats will probably still arrive before the Raiders do.
Just make sure it comes free-of-charge and with a side of penicillin.
Yes, you can tell I’ve nearly given up on the Green Machine. I’m not sure how much more patience I’ve got to give, and I don’t even follow the club.
They’ve got the pack, they’ve got the coach, and this year, they’ve got the halves, yet their talented squad continues to stooge us by failing to produce on their oft-vaunted promise.
This kind of frustration and disappointment may have been the hallmark of the dying embers of the evil Furner Axis, but I won’t cop it from a team full of gun recruits. If I wanted real inexplicable unpredictability in my footy, I’d go and watch the Oatley thirds.
Once as enticing as diphtheria on the player market, Canberra has enjoyed more fruitful times on talent acquisition in recent seasons. Players no longer view a stint in lime green like a sleepover at the Milat household, and the cattle have slowly arrived as a result.
So in addition to their usual power-pack of country bumpkin fire and brimstone, and a home ground advantage that forces visiting teams to spend time in Canberra against their will, they’ve slowly built an entire roster bursting with verve and capacity.
This is especially so in 2016.
Add Aidan Sezer and Blake Austin, arguably the most lethal halves pairing in the ACT, and I’m going to need more than some home torture and two wins per season over Wayne Bennett’s Dragons.
Yes, I feel let down because I believe the Raiders are a serious team. Seriously capable, seriously threatening, yet seriously proficient at self-sabotage.
Their blueprint for the top four should be a cinch.
Firstly, they should be unbeatable at home, and secondly, their power game should be bruising their way to a handful of wins elsewhere. It’s much like how the Warriors could be successful, only I expect the Raiders to carry it out.
After a strong start to the season, I allowed myself to believe this could be the year they begin braining it towards the hallowed reaches of the upper echelons. Instead, since then they have beaten themselves so often, the only team they have the wood on is themselves.
The Raiders have achieved this hoodoo by mastering the art of abominable decision making. For example, this decision making:
Passing to forwards on the last tackle, passing to the opposition in golden point, and allowing Jordan Rapana to cut his own hair with a kitchen mixer.
As you can see, they’d be better off delegating to a magic eight-ball.
Will they ever hit their straps and dominate this damn competition?
In fairness, this unfulfilled anticipation and cruel frustration inflicted by Canberra’s teams isn’t a fresh concept for their poor rusted-on fans.
It’s been so long since anything enjoyable has occurred that Jason Bulgarelli’s famous season-destroying spill in 2003 is now considered the club’s new ‘glory days’.
Even the new generation of fans are so distanced from the original golden years, they know Ricky Stuart not as their former master halfback, but only as a bloke who kicks chairs at them.
However, this season is far from an unmitigated disaster, and it could still be salvaged with a face-saving seventh placed finish.
In the club’s defence, Sia Soliola, Jeff Lima, Sezer and Austin have all spent time on the sidelines helping nobody, while Josh Hodgson has elevated to the upper-crust of hookers, so that’s better than a kick in the teeth.
Plus there’s always the boost of the Origin period to come, a time when the players they developed for richer clubs go MIA for someone else.
Whatever happens, and despite my impatience and frustration, I’m willing to give Canberra one more chance to finally arrive. Then another chance, then one more after that, and then as many as it takes before they live up to that potential.
But they’re on notice.