Matt Lodge booed as Dragons bone Broncos in the tunnel of love

So! The first game of our 2018 National Rugby League is run and done, and St George Illawarra Dragons have beaten Brisbane Broncos at famous old Kogarah-Jubilee, the suburban soul town near the Carlton Hotel.

And it was… okay. In parts. Some things were pretty good. Some were not very good.

Matt Lodge was booed.

The knock-back is still not a thing.

The Dragons have some tasty backs to go with their meat-axes mid-field.

First set of the season? Paul Vaughan went boom. Then James Graham – boom! Matt Gillett went after him, launching himself horizontally at speed. Vaughan went again. And Ben Hunt sent a drop punt into Bronco Land.

And we were away thus in this season of our Lord Rocket Reddy.

First set Broncos? Who else? Lodge! The bad-boy at speed. Graham went him. Jack De Belin went him.

The crowd booed Lodge first run and second, and each one thereafter.

A man on the Twitters mooted that Jimmy G might attack the madman of New York because… because.

Lodge, though, is now apparently rehabilitated. Let’s hope he so. Some dudes don’t mix well with alcohol, as the vision of him in Manhattan would seem to attest.

The crowd? Top crowd; a good, healthy thick mass hill-side. Beautiful Autumnal evening, sou’-easterly breeze. A really good, meaty, thick mass on the hill. Standing up, watching footy, blowing the froth of the top of a tinnie. Very good times.

They don’t talk of these simple pleasures in stadium debates, but they should, the damned fools.

Because surely it’s people – constituents, voters – voting with their feet. Kogarah-Jubilee sports a fat swathe of grass. And people fill it like so many happy clappers in rapture.

And surely 20,000 packed in looks better than 20,000 spread around Homebush like flecks of rice on the world’s biggest wok.

And so the dulcet tones of Rabs Warren washed over us and we settled in on couches around the land mainly in the two northern states of the eastern seaboard.

“Lodge!” exhorted the great man Rabs. “At a hundred miles an hour, the big fellah!”

You can hear him saying it as you read this, the rolling, roiling larynx, the upwards inflections, the high octaves. The man is perennial. Great stuff.

Despite Rabby’s enthusiasm, though, it wasn’t much chop as a game 20 minutes in.

Lodge knocked the ball back but it was called knock-on, it’s how the game is officiated. It is understood.

Rugby league requires black-and-white adjudicating otherwise except for the knock-back rule which is always a knock-on. I have given up.

More penalties followed and the Broncos took the two and the Dragons took two more. It was physical. But it was something of a squib.

And so Lodge was booed and booed again, what Rabby called “groans” and “raspberries.”

And after 27 minutes of mayhem in the maelstrom, he (Lodge) came off.

“Very good effort by him,” remarked Paul Vautin, the crazy thing on the piss in New York was three years and seemingly forgotten and/or forgiven.

Actually no-one’s forgotten and only the Broncos and greater officialdom’s forgiven, really.

Maybe not forgiven. It’s a vexed one. It was three years ago. The man’s only 22 now.

Yet most of us can’t un-see the giant Lodge throwing haymakers at those poor people in Manhattan, knowing there’s 9-year-old kid cowering in fear…

So the footage was damning.

Yet had we seen that which sent Russell Packer to jail we’d be darker on him, too, and he’s a success story.

Mitchell Pearce’s poodle thing cost him $120,000 because some dim-bulb filmed it.

(Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)

Anyway.

First try came when Ben Hunt grubbered tidily from dummy-half and Tyson Frizell leapt upon the pill in-goal.

Jeremy Latimore carted it up, he’s played at more clubs than Mick Jagger.

De Belin continued the hard charges and dummies, passing occasionally. Body build for rugby league sin, JDB, and a Blues jumper beckons.

Milford dropped the ball, behind him, hint of a strip by Widdop. The ball landed on Milford’s leg as he was facing his own line and went backwards.

It’s a knock-back rugby league, it’s a low of the game, have we forasken it? I can’t let it go.

Authorities have cracked down on incorrect play-the-ball, and that’s perhaps fair enough given slowing down play-the-ball is a good thing given the game can get too much like touch footy with bodies filling legislated space, dump, repeat.

But touch footy be buggered. It’s a sport for automatons. And one of touch footy’s rules is “Drop ball”. And rugby league has adopted it. And is worse for it.

Because: knock-back? Play on! The game is better when it’s “messy”, unstructured, the ball bounding about in what Rex Mossop would call “harum-scarum” fashion.

And next week, we channel the Moose and go to town. Can’t let it go.

Half-time and Freddy ripped off a typically pointless panting interview with Ben Hunt.

Then Freddy and Locky and the dude used to be on Fox but swapped with Yvonne Sampson had a chat.

Then Joey and Erin and spunky Girds previewed The Footy Show, the boys wearing long-sleeve shirts with the sleeves rolled up, they got the idea from Channel Ten’s Big Bash and Matthew Johns’ shows on Fox, I bet.

No Fatty? Bold move, for mine. The Fat was the Footy Show for 24 years, which would suggest he was a bit popular.

Twenty-four years is so many lifetimes on television considering that Chopper knock-off didn’t last a fortnight.

Back into the footy second-half and the Broncos were ordinary and the Dragons were not.

Jason Nightingale scored a typically leaping try in the corner and landed on his head.

Euan Aitken scored in the same area, a rumbling little nugget of an outside centre.

And Ben Hunt took an intercept from the first pass made in anger by Lodge and ran away laughing into the night before kicking the ball out the ground onto Jubilee Street.

And Dragons 34 defeated Broncos 12.

And into the tunnel of love we go.