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I started trying to talk myself into tipping Canberra to win the premiership, thinking it might at least take a while – but it didn’t take long at all.
It is a very open-looking competition. There are clearly more teams that can win it than not, but there is something about the Raiders and their second half of last season that makes me believe they can go on with the job this year.
They won’t have to find a massive amount of improvement to make the grand final. They are going to have to get better, like every team, but they only fell just short of making it in 2016.
They lost by two points to Cronulla in the first week of the finals and went down by the same margin to Melbourne in the third week.
In between those two games, they beat another team on the rise, Penrith, by ten points.
Of course, the two teams that beat Canberra both made the grand final, with the Sharks winning 14-12.
Both Cronulla and Melbourne have suffered significant player losses, with Michael Ennis and Ben Barba gone from the Sharks and Blake Green, Kevin Proctor and Marika Koroibete having exited the Storm.
Melbourne will get a fair bit coming back the other way if fullback Billy Slater makes a successful comeback from a shoulder injury, which would have the flow-on effect of allowing Cameron Munster to switch permanently to five-eighth, but we’ll have to wait and see what happens there.
Canberra, meanwhile, will be going around with pretty much the same squad that took them so far last season.
They have lost bench forward Paul Vaughan, but among their pick-ups are a couple of forwards who will immediately compete for places in the match-day 17, in Jordan Turner and Dunamis Lui.
Turner is another Englishman, which is a signing trend by the Raiders that gives them an advantage over some other teams through the difficult middle stages of the competition when many star players miss club games because of State of Origin commitments.
Hooker Josh Hodgson and second-rower Elliott Whitehead are also English, and Hodgson in particular was in superb form last season.
Hodgson would be good enough to play Origin, but of course he isn’t eligible so the Raiders don’t lose him to NSW or Queensland. He gets properly rested via the bye rounds and doesn’t have to back up for any club games after three or four days.
Shannon Boyd may well be chosen by the Blues now that he is a Test player and several other players will come into consideration, including obviously Josh Papalii for the Maroons.
But the Raiders aren’t going to have so many players picked that they will be flattened by Origin representation.
Canberra won their last ten games of the regular season to finish in second place going into the finals last year. They nearly kept it going in the finals series, but that lack of playoff experience made a difference they were unable to overcome.
Still, they came so close and now they have some of that vital experience.
The Raiders are a mostly-young team and it is fair to assume that because so many of their key players are aged in their early-to-mid 20s they are only going to get better.
Canberra were easily the highest-scoring team in the competition last season, with 688 points at an average of 28.6 per game.
They were only the seventh-best team defensively and the challenge will be to improve in that area, but their defensive efforts in the finals were encouraging.
I’m happy to go with the Raiders as my tip. It promises to be a fun ride.
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