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Honestly, this game. It slaps you around the face sometimes. Or, if you’re Seb Kris, it bashes you in the forehead and all comes up your way anyway. Robert Lewandowski would have been proud of the header that set up Jordan Rapana for the match-clinching try.
This was an upset of sorts, but also one of those days where either team could have won but only one team can. Melbourne crash out, Canberra march on.
But what actually happened? No really: what on Earth just happened?
The Raiders are an unkillable beast. There doesn’t seem to be much method. There certainly isn’t a discernible style. And yet, this Raiders team keep winning, keep winning close games, keep getting over the Storm at AAMI Park.
Ricky Stuart is either riding his luck massively or he’s onto something. Given that I grew up thinking Sticky was akin to a rugby league god, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, but in truth, I think it’s as much an arrangement of individuals as it is anything systematic.
Tapine, as mentioned, was exceptional. When he was tired, Papali’i picked up the slack. And in Hudson Young, they have a guy that keeps getting his hand on the ball when it matters.
My gut tells me that this was a system draw, or even a system win for Melbourne, who did a lot right and got some horrendous variance. Goalkicking, a bounce that Munster missed and Young scored, a pass that went off a bloke’s head and fell for Jordan Rapana…that’s fairly out of their control.
But in this game, as they say, sometimes you make your own luck.
We’re told that finals are all about the grind, but that was near-absent in this game. The pattern generally involves the traditional softening up period, followed by one side getting a gradual upper hand and capitalising. This was more conventional back-and-forth footy.
Melbourne are as happy as any to get stuck in as any, but Canberra weren’t up to it. The Raiders, in the first half at least, were good defensively on their own line but terrible at stopping the Storm advancing and setting up camp.
The stats were stark. Melbourne had enjoyed 14 sets to seven early on, then the pendulum shifted completely and Canberra smashed the Storm through the middle.
The difference was resilience. The Storm were ineffective initially but cashed in eventually with two tries, though Canberra scored on the breakaway in between. When the Raiders were ascendant, they got their points (and kicked their goals) as a result of poor defence.
It was all going so well, until…
Melbourne love to grind. Right? Received wisdom is a great thing. The joy of this iteration of the Storm is that they know how to play multiple ways, and they showed it in the second half.
Going into the game, everyone and their granny would have expected the game to be a forwards battle, but as discussed above, it wasn’t really like that.
In the first half, Melbourne struggled with their ability to withstand repeat effort bouts on their own line, largely due to how easily the Raiders were spotting up Nick Meaney in attack.
So they changed the conversation. The Storm approach immediately after the break was to put air under the footy and play to their strength in the backline, attacking from deep and unsettling their opponents.
This was a masterstroke from Craig Bellamy, not only because he has built a level of flexibility over years that gives him one of the few teams that can change pace so drastically, but also because he upped the pace as the Raiders’ middles reached their fatigue points.
Joe Tapine, though excellent, was already past his average minutes per game, while Adam Elliott had already left with an injury and Josh Papali’i was off the field gassed. A key strategic aspect of rugby league (or any sport) is doing what your opponent wants to do least. Bellamy picked the perfect moment to do that.
Joe Tapine has been one of the best props in the game this year. Melbourne, surely, must have known this in video but seemed shocked when the Raiders used him as both a battering ram and a scalpel in the first half.
It was Tapine who created the first two tries, with an offload under heavy contact that allowed Jack Wighton to set up Matt Timoko and then a deft pass of his own for Elliott Whitehead.
You could chart most of the best things that the Raiders did to the prop, who was worth 209 metres and 28 tackles alongside his ball-playing.
Jahrome Hughes showed his intentions early. The halfback runs more than just about any other 7 in the NRL and set his stall out with four darts in the first five minutes.
Melbourne’s season essentially hangs on his shoulders. With him, they are contenders and have a spine that only the Panthers can match. Without, Cameron Munster has to do everything and it all falls apart. It was noticeable how much they waned when he departed for a HIA.
Hughes created one try for Xavier Coates and had a hand in another, as much through the threat of his run – established early on – as anything else, because Munster got far more space than he might overwise have been afforded.
You might think of it as the (excuse my Pom exuberance) Anderson-Broad effect, where one takes wickets because of the other. Munster gets plenty of chances to be as good as he is because of what Hughes does at the other end.