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Opinion
Canberra are right to be angry and no coach in the NRL fits that mould more so than Ricky Stuart but Jack Wighton’s switch to South Sydney is in large part the club’s own doing.
The Raiders have not put themselves in a position to consistently contend for the premiership and Wighton wants a Grand Final victory before he retires.
At 30, he sees a better chance of fulfilling that goal at a team like the Rabbitohs than by staying with the Green Machine.
In an age when sportspeople are roundly criticised for following the dollars, Wighton should be commended for his decision to accept less at Souths than the riches he could have raked in by staying in the national capital or taking a punt on the Dolphins.
Jack Wighton. (Photo by Mark Nolan/Getty Images)
Unfortunately the scourge of trolling on social media has reared its insidiously ugly head again and Wighton has called them out. The person who sent this to Wighton should be ashamed of themselves and they deserve to cop the full weight of the law.
The Raiders have lodged a complaint with the salary cap auditor about Wighton’s deal with Souths not being up to market value and Stuart issued a statement on Wednesday putting the heat on the NRL over its controversial contract system.
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As the CBA stalemate gets set to go six months past its deadline, the previous system where players can sign elsewhere up to 12 months out from the end of their contract is still in operation.
“As a club, we believe the current contracting system where players can sign well out from the end of their current contract is flawed,” Stuart opined in the statement. “It is not fair to you who I see as our major stakeholders, the club, and as importantly the players.”
This is true but not really the point in this instance. The statement seems more like a diversionary tactic.
And there was little protest from Canberra in 2016 when they signed Joseph Tapine from Newcastle early in the final season of his deal and the young forward was agitating for a release to get to the Raiders.
It’s a poor look for a professional sports league to have a high-profile star like Wighton committing to another club when not even a third of the current season has been completed.
However, Raiders fans need to ask themselves why Wighton didn’t want to stick around.
How did this team that was so perilously close to winning the premiership in 2019 go backwards so quickly the past three years?
They were contenders again the following year when none other than Wighton put in his best season to claim the Dally M Medal, finishing fifth on the ladder and bowing out in the preliminary final stage to eventual premiers Melbourne. No shame in that.
But in the past two years they have pretty much been making up the numbers without ever threatening the top teams – they were 10th in 2021 and eighth last year before upsetting the Storm in the first round of the playoffs before copping a 40-4 hiding from Parramatta.
Raiders coach Ricky Stuart with Jack Wighton. (Photo by Brendon Thorne/Getty Images)
They are again on track for mid-table irrelevance with a 3-4 record heading into Saturday’s stoush with the Dolphins at Wagga Wagga.
Canberra have paid the price for overpaying veterans or signing them a year or two too long and have never been able to replace John Bateman’s X-factor presence in the forward pack.
They’ve had bad luck along the way, particularly Bateman and halfback George Williams, turning their back on the club despite the Raiders doing everything they could to keep the English internationals happy while Josh Hodgson’s ongoing injury dramas robbed them of a creative spark out of dummy-half.
And the continued loyalty to Stuart is the lime green elephant in the room at Raiders HQ.
He’s embarking on his 10th season at the helm and has a contract for another two seasons after the club extended his deal last year.
In five of his nine seasons the club has had a losing record and finished 10th or worse.
As he said in his statement on Wednesday, he “bleeds green” as much as the most loyal Raiders fan and as one of the greatest players to lace up a boot for Canberra during their three-premiership golden era from 1989-94, he deserves eternal respect at the club.
But if he wasn’t a club legend as a player, would Raiders officials have been so patient and quick to offer him the contract extensions that have been thrown his way since he returned home in 2014?
A dispassionate analysis of his record suggests it’s something of an anomaly that someone with these results is the third-longest tenured coach at an NRL club behind Trent Robinson (who joined the Roosters a year earlier and has won three titles) and Craig Bellamy, who has been successful for 20 years at the Storm and looks like he will shelve any retirement plans for at least another season.
“I want to reassure you all that the club did everything possible to keep Jack at the Raiders and we wanted nothing more than to see him reach 300 games and become a one-club player,” Stuart said.
“I want to let our loyal members and fans know that I bleed green as much as you do, and as much as it hurts today, our future is still ahead of us, and we will continue on the path we best see fit to give this club the success it deserves.”
Stuart did go on to say the Raiders would “continue to invest in our successful development and pathways systems”, which is exactly what Canberra need to do.
The inevitable rebuild that was coming anyway has now been accelerated by Wighton’s earlier-than-expected departure.
They can’t afford to keep using up sizeable chunks of their salary cap on the likes of Jarrod Croker, Jordan Rapana, Josh Papalii and Elliott Whitehead, who have been great for the club but are not the players they once were.
Xavier Savage. (Photo by Mark Nolan/Getty Images)
The likes of young fullback Xavier Savage, prop Corey Horsburgh, second-rower Hudson Young and centre Matt Timoko are the building blocks for the future.
Canberra drove themselves nuts a decade-plus ago when they continually missed out on high-profile recruits or the ones they signed didn’t stick around very long, such as Blake Ferguson and Junior Paulo.
And they made the tough calls to send locally produced troublemakers packing like Todd Carney and Josh Dugan only to see them succeed at other clubs.
The change in mindset for what became the team that made the 2019 decider was to invest in players who didn’t care for the bright lights of big cities like Sydney and Brisbane.
Blue-collar workers from country areas like Croker, Wighton and Tapine, mixed in with Kiwi hard nuts like Rapana and Sia Soliola, and British imports who didn’t see Canberra’s climate as a turn-off when you come from the north of England.
Unfortunately for Raiders fans hoping lightning will strike twice, the chances of the current side doing anything close to the 2019 team are pretty remote.
The club will have plenty of cash to spend next season but overpaying for imports is unlikely to do much apart from paper over the cracks.
It’s time to hit the reset button in the national capital rather than look for a quick fix and the club needs to ask whether Stuart is the right coach to lead them long term.