Ricky and his Raiders have a bright future

You’d be forgiven for thinking that The Canberra Raiders were in total crisis reading the press this week. 

Consider the following dramas they are facing:

• Just over 7,000 turned up for the Warriors clash last Sunday
• Two of their star players in Shaun Fensom and David Shillington suffered season ending injuries
• The Warriors match was the third time this season the side had a half-century posted against them
• It will be the first time since the 1985/86 seasons that the side has missed the finals in consecutive years
• It looks very likely that the club will get its first wooden spoon since 1982
• Star player Anthony Milford has been poached by the seemingly endless resources of the Brisbane Broncos
• James Tedesco reneged on a deal to come to Canberra and Josh Mansour, Michael Ennis and Kevin Proctor all declined invitations to come; and of course
• People trotting out the line that Ricky Stuart is the worst coach of all time.

All of this reached fever pitch when Brad Walter in the Fairfax press raised the idea that the Raiders were under serious threat from the AFL. 

He also raised the issue of the Raiders relocating:

One influental club chief executive recently told this column he believed the NRL should focus on dominating the east coast of Australia by introducing more teams in Queensland, including another in Brisbane to rival the Broncos – but only if the likes of the Sharks or Raiders relocated.

So this NRL CEO thinks a team should be introduced where his greatest opposition are located, and a couple should be removed from his region? If I was the CEO of, for example, the Roosters, I’d think those ideas would be spot on the money. Mind you, I also think that the NSW Lotteries officials should just do the right thing and only put my numbers in the Powerball machine.   

However, hopefully Dave Smith – although previously a banker – has the interest of game at large at heart rather than the vested interests of the few.

Things at the Raiders are pretty grim right now. However, the future looks pretty good, and there are lots of reasons why.

1. The Raiders are financially secure
Whereas Newcastle, Cronulla, Wests Tigers and St George Illawarra all have required financial assistance from the NRL recently, the Canberra Raiders Group has nine licensed clubs and other financial support.

2. They are a one-team town
Unlike the Titans, who must deal with the behemoth that is the Brisbane Broncos, and the eight Sydney clubs who share a market, Canberra has the place to itself.

It has been well organised so the Raiders games are rarely on the same weekend as the Brumbies and – contrary to the claims in Brad Walter’s article – the supposed threat posed by Greater Western Sydney isn’t supported by the facts.

The seven GWS games held in Canberra are in the eleven lowest-attended AFL games ever in the nation’s capital. Their average crowd is 1000 lower than the Raiders’ average this season and, in fact, only 6549 people turned up to see them play in May. It would be interesting to know how many came in on complimentary tickets too. 

Hardly a massive threat there Brad…

3. The bad boys are gone
Ok, they were very talented players but Josh Dugan and Blake Ferguson were a cancer. Their poor behaviour and belief that they were bigger than the team destabilised the whole squad and basically destroyed season 2013. Does any club really want that sort of influence around their junior players? 

There was a lot of talk about how Canberra must have a bad culture because both players got the boot, as did Todd Carney in 2008, but that logic is back-to-front. A place that had a bad culture wouldn’t sack them, they’d excuse the behaviour away and keep them.  

Raiders CEO Don Furner has three times taken hard decisions to protect the culture at the Raiders. If you want to act up, you’d better go to one of the party-boy clubs – oh, and you’d better be a really good player.

4. The fans are great
Admittedly 7,094 is a dismal crowd, however whereas most other sides bring a fair few fans to the ground, the Warriors have practically no travelling support, so pretty much all of those spectators were Raiders fans and they turned up in spite of the Raiders’ poor results, the Warriors being a low draw-card team, and the Raiders having nothing to play for.  

That means those 7,000 fans are rusted-on.

Sure, they might be miserable right now. They probably have a few opinions about how things could be done better. And no doubt they are probably yelling out a few derogatory things. 

Although, as acknowledged by Jarrod Croker in my post-match interview with him, they were served up “garbage”.

Last season – in the middle of Australia’s biggest city – only 8,900 turned up for Parramatta’s Round 25 match against the Dragons, and no one called for them to be relocated. Only 7,782 turned up on Monday night to see the Wests Tigers, who can still make the finals, take on the Melbourne Storm. Perhaps they should be relocated to Dubbo? 

I bet the anonymous influential club chief executive would agree.

5. The playing roster is full of talent
This season has been cruelled by injuries to Jack Wighton and Edrick Lee, as well as the holes in the roster left by Dugan and Ferguson.  However, the squad has masses of talent. 

Croker and Wighton are two of the best up-and-coming centres in the game. Edrick Lee is a dynamic winger. Mitch Cornish shows real promise as a future number 7. Shaun Fensom is a superb tackling lock forward with great hands at the line. Josh Papalii on the charge is more than a little reminiscent of Mal Meninga. Paul Vaughn and Shannon Boyd are both as talented as they are monstrous, and both are a number of years off their best.  

Add to that the excellent signings of Hull KR hooker Josh Hodgson, St Helen’s utility Iosia Soliola and Storm winger Sisa Waqa, and the Raiders could be on the verge of a great era.

While losing Milford is sad, young Tony is a dreadful one-on-one defender and has the worst kick return stats for a fullback in the NRL.  Now all the money they were going to spend on him can go to a number of players.

6. Ricky Stuart has the total backing of the board
The board has signed Stuart to a long-term deal, and you can bet they’ll stand by it. Any decent student of the game will know that unless you get lucky, it takes around five years to shape a squad that can challenge for the title. 

It took Des Hasler until his fifth season at Manly to win the premiership. Craig Bellamy didn’t win with the Storm until his fifth year.  Even Wayne Bennett took five years to get his first NSWRL title with the Broncos. 

The Raiders board understands this and will give Stuart full backing for the long term. In that time he’ll be able to create the team he wants, playing the game he wants. 

Ricky’s coaching record is often maligned but he won a premiership in 2002 as coach and took his side to the 2003 and 2004 grand finals as well. Brad Fittler’s subsequent coaching record suggests Ricky had a fair bit to do with those results after all. Or if he didn’t, then it is Fittler to blame for the ’03, ’04 and ’05 failures, not Stuart. 

As well, Ricky got the Cronulla Sharks to equal first place at the end of the home-and-away season in just his second year at the club, which is the best anyone has done with that mob in 15 years. 

He has been given hell about his wooden spoon with the Eels in 2013 but in reality the club – which has more issues than Big League – was in appalling shape when he arrived and has been the rugby league byword for dysfunction and in-fighting for a quarter of a century. 

Ricky’s subsequent clean-out of players may well have been the tonic that has them looking to achieve their first finals berth since 2009.

7. The darkest hour is just before the dawn
A really bad season is often the catalyst for a club to achieve good results.

The Roosters won the wooden spoon in 2009 before making the grand final the next year. The Warriors won the spoon in 2000 before playing in the 2002 grand final. The Penrith Panthers came last in 2001 before winning the competition in 2003. The Wests Tigers finished third-last in 2002 and 2003, before winning the premiership in 2005. 

Someone comes last every year by having a dismal season. Imagine if we kicked each side out that did?

8. The NRL will surely step into to level the playing field
Although Dave Smith watched Brisbane poach a player the Raiders developed from the age of 13 and did nothing to help, he has made noises that he will look at bringing in salary cap concessions for juniors that a club develops. Whether he does that in time to stop the stronger clubs stealing more of the talent that the Raiders have developed is yet to be seen. 

However, the Canberra/Queanbeyan/Yass/Goulburn region is an established grassroots rugby league area, and any NRL CEO worth his salt will make sure it is nurtured, developed and promoted – even if anonymous influential CEOs don’t want it.

Perhaps third-party sponsorships will be capped and a player draft – so effective at equalising talent in the AFL – will be introduced. And who knows, the NRL may even make the free-to-air broadcaster show someone other than the Broncos and the big Sydney clubs on Friday nights, so that the smaller clubs get exposure and can draw bigger and better sponsorship. 

If this doesn’t happen, the NRL will further develop into an inequitably run, two-tiered competition. You want to see crowds and revenue continue to decline? Then just let that trend keep going Mr Smith.

You can’t have a Cinderella story without the rags and ashes. When the Raiders turn these results around and climb back to the pinnacle of the rugby league world, that victory will belong to those 7,000 rusted-on fans who turned up in the dark times. 

You can bet that victory will be all the sweeter for it too.