Opinion
The Canberra Raiders’ 2016 campaign began, as good ones sometimes do, with a pretty fair clean out.
Goodbye and thanks for the hits and memories Josh McCrone, Frank-Paul Nu’uausala, David Shillington, Dane Tilse, Sisa Waqa and Joel Edwards, who went to the Wests Tigers, apparently by choice.
Hello, sailors Aidan Sezer, Jeff Lima, Joey Leilua and Elliott Whitehead, who a mate from St Helens had warned would make sweet music on the edges. He did. They all did.
And on a glorious day in early September, I was watching these people on a big screen at Collaroy Services Beach Club with my mate Darren. And we were punting, as the saying goes, our rings out. And we were winning. Large.
Because the Wests Tigers had been tipped for victory all week.
It’s hard to believe, but Sydney-based media’s reasoning for tipping the Tigers was four-fold:
a) the game was must-win for the Wests Tigers to get into the finals;
b) it would be a sell-out; with fans perched on the red roofs of Leichhardt;
c) Robbie Farah would be farewelled (though would not play) and so would Dene Halatau (who, unfortunately for him, would play);
And d) media was in Sydney and the Wests Tigers are a Sydney story and Canberra’s down the road and journos have always been a bit meh about Canberra because roundabouts, politicians and memories of day-trip excursions to Parliament House and Questacon and the boring-except-for-some-cool-bits War Memorial.
(Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)
True story – because Canberra’s not deemed as cool as sexy old Sydney town with its blinding beaches and avant-garde graffiti and silicone bosoms bouncing along the banks of Rushcutters Bay, Sydney sports journalists would write off the Raiders.
And over the years I took many a carton of Melbourne Bitter from these people.
And on that Sunday afternoon I took more than – prime your best Paul Vautin – a thousand from a corporate bookmaker because of them.
Because, may Hermes the eternal Greek god of gambling bless them, so many of these people, these pundits, these top experts had filled mainstream and social media with the notion that the Wests Tigers would win and thus earn a place in the finals.
And thus the Wests Tigers’ price with bookmakers was, to quote a term, massive unders.
Conversely, in the yin and yang nature of making a book on a two-horse race, the Canberra Raiders’ price of $1.50 was money for very old rope.
They should’ve been $1.04. They were Winx. And the Wests Tigers were not Fine Cotton much less Bold Personality. They were barely Mister Ed, a talking horse from olden days television.
Instead, noble, ill-judged, heartfelt sentiment – dear sweet noble, ill-judged, heartfelt sentiment – was with the Wests Tigers and their gnarled old champion Robbie Farah, much as it had been in 1990 when the fellow whose name adorns the brick outhouse on the top of the Leichhardt hill, Wayne Pearce, played his last game at Leichhardt Oval, a 14-10 loss to the Parramatta Eels.
And said pundits influenced bettors to forget that the Wests Tigers were, in 2016, not very bloody good.
The Tigers had lost more than they’d won. They’d lost the previous week’s game to the New Zealand Warriors. Farah wasn’t going to play and he was quite good.
(Photo by Jason McCawley/Getty Images)
Yet in the week of the Leichhardt game, the ‘story’, in Sydney anyway, was that one team, the Sydney team, had more to play for. The old more to play for. And thus they forgot, disregarded, left out, whatevs, the fact that the Canberra Raiders, in that glorious year 2016, were smoking shit-hot.
Consider: in Round 21, Canberra beat South Sydney by 50 points. In Round 22 they touched up Cronulla 30-14 at the old Endeavour Field.
A week later they beat the mighty Melbourne Storm – with all their stars – 22-8 in Canberra and people nudged each other in the stands and asked: my fellow Canberran, do you believe? I say again: do you bloody believe?
There followed demolitions of the Parramatta Eels (28-18) in Canberra and the Manly Sea Eagles (44-30) at Brookvale.
When the Raiders turned up at Leichhardt they’d won nine games straight. They hadn’t lost since June 9 against the Brisbane Broncos, who were actually pretty good given they had Corey Parker, Sam Thaiday, Josh McGuire, Ben Hunt, Anthony Milford and a fullback in Darius Boyd who appeared to give a shit.
Meanwhile, the Raiders had been without Jack Wighton at fullback. His place was taken by Townsville kid Zac Santo, who would play two games for Canberra and then 14 for XIII Limouxin, the Limoux Grizzlies, in France’s Elite One competition.
And they – the dreaded they – also, criminally for punters who believed their forecasts, forgot or disregarded or misplaced in the mad fugue of parochial sentimentality for Sydney and the Tigers and Leichhardt and sainted, dear departed Robbie Farah that, in the previous meeting between the teams, in Anzac Round, the Canberra Raiders had beaten the Wests Tigers 60-6.
I didn’t forget. And with head and heart firmly in sync, I got on most everything there was possible to get on.
I verily unloaded upon the $1.50. I created a line of 30.5 points. I backed the Raiders to win both halves. I backed Jordan Rapana to score two or more tries (because he’d scored four in the 60-6 game). There were others. And all of them – tick, tick, tick, boom – got up.
(Photo by Jason McCawley/Getty Images)
By half-time Josh Papalii had a double, Jarrod Croker had kicked five from five from everywhere and it was 30-4. Rapana scored his double, including one from a Leilua out-of-the-arse flick pass you should YouTube at your earliest convenience. And the Raiders won 52-10.
As Chris Barrett of The Sydney Morning Herald later mused: “Perhaps expectations had been ramped up too highly, the anticipation of a possible finals berth making the believers forget just how destructive a package Ricky Stuart has assembled in Canberra and about the 60-6 flogging the Raiders had handed them in April.”
Chris, I believe we chalk our pool cue from the same blue receptacle. Barrett also declared that Stuart’s team were “out of sight, out of mind no longer”.
And Raiders fans – who’d seen their team lose only one game in the last 14 and win ten on the trot in exciting fashion – declared: you f***in’ think?
Yet, again, for Sydney the story of the match was Robbie Farah. At half-time he’d done a lap of honour. After the match he perched himself on a ledge of the maggoty old scoreboard and enjoyed a moment in the sun with a tinny of beer. And media took many pictures of him.
Meanwhile the “out of sight” Raiders headed home humming. And Canberra fans did, too. And this one owned Sportsbet as so many Raiders fans hurtling metaphorically down the Hume owned so many Tiger skin accoutrements.
For when Jared Maxwell blew time off at 3:52pm and the Wests Tigers had been borderline eviscerated, I had better than a digital gorilla in the betting account.
And Darren and I drank beer and gin and something else, cognac, maybe, or Cointreau, and headed over the road to an Indian restaurant where we spilled red wine and tandoori chicken on our shirt fronts and laughed like fools and tipped like corporate titans.
And they were very good times.
And then I gave the money back to Sportsbet.
This is an extract from Matt Cleary’s The Milk: a 40-year odyssey of fandom for rugby league’s great enigma. Get a copy at www.themilkbook.com.
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