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The Warriors have overturned the Raiders’ record as the masters of the close games with an epic 21-20 victory in Golden Point, with Shaun Johnson the field goal hero.
They were forced to work for their win after a stunning Raiders comeback, with Canberra coming from 20-6 down to force extra time thanks to a stunning Jack Wighton try with a second left on the clock.
The sideline conversion might have won it, but instead, the honour fell to Johnson, who iced his first opportunity.
It would have been travesty had Andrew Webster’s men not come out on top, given the run of the play, but the Raiders are made of the toughest stuff and simply would not go away.
Ricky Stuart focused on a first half incident in which Dallin Watene-Zelezniak looked like he had made a miracle tackle to dislodge the ball as Seb Kris dove to score, but Sticky thought he had been collected high in the process.
“It should never have got to golden point,” he told the post-match press conference.
“In regards to that decision with Seb Kris right before halftime, it was a high shot and it should’ve been a penalty try.
“That’s what it is,” he said of Golden Point. “It’s the rules of the game. A little bit like getting hit in the head when you’re over the goal-line to score a try and you drop it. They’re the rules of the game too”.
This was a game between two of the better sides in the NRL, but for much of the first half, you wouldn’t have known it.
There were twelve errors, three penalties and four set restarts in the first half hour, with Wighton the culprit for three of them, not including the kick he sent 15m over the sideline. It wasn’t a classic, to say the least.
By the end, nobody was saying that. The Warriors looked a million dollars in racing to their lead, but the Raiders don’t know what quit is.
They huffed and puffed all night in attack – and lost Joseph Tapine to a head knock – but with one set to save themselves, produced a flowing move to get Wighton in for a superb try.
Ricky’s Raiders rarely look good, but they are so effective.
The Warriors, on the hand, might well be very good. They’re now third on the live ladder and have a soft draw that moves a top four finish well into Webster’s sights.
“The lesson is we can’t relieve pressure when we’ve got the foot on the throat,” said the coach. “I don’t think we won ugly. There was so much good stuff and when you get yourself into trouble you’ve got to know how to get yourself out of it.
“Every good team improves each week from now on and we need to be one of those teams. If we were struggling with the pressure, we wouldn’t have gone on to win in Golden Point.”
Webster’s brand of football, in year one at least, has been pretty simple.
His side tried to complete very high at the start of the season, and still do that in the early parts of sets, before putting on a few select moves when the opportunity arises.
In defence, they play very narrow and encourage teams to take them on outside, while bashing teams up in the middle. They’ll back themselves to defend the line, too.
This was the best of both aspects. Their defence shut down the Raiders completely, limiting their opposition to just one line break across 80 minutes.
Canberra had the better of it in field position, aided by a massive wind at their backs, but struggled to make significant inroads against committed Warriors defence.
When the Kiwis got their chances, they took them. On the first three times they got into good ball, three times they hit left and three times they scored.
Marata Niukore – who later left with a HIA – got the first, then Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad, then Dallin Watene-Zelezniak all profited.
The twin triumphs of Webster’s reign so far have been the way that he has got his team to believe in and play for each other, which is written all over their defence, and to believe in his attacking system, which is paying off at the other end.
He’ll worry about the way that it all ended, but that might even speak again to the resilience that he has built in the group. Even when they threw it away, they caught it again.
Canberra have excelled at winning close games, which inherently comes with a little bit of luck. That ran out at times tonight.
Fogarty’s radar was slightly off, sliding a kick past the post rather than hitting the protector, and when the pitching wedge was perfect, Kris was denied a try by a superb Watene-Zelezniak tackle.
Fortune is one thing, but execution is another. Stuart has proven a master at catching punches, one of the very best at identifying the strengths and weaknesses of opponents and exploiting them.
He must have known about the right edge of the Warriors, but his men had no answer to the shape.
It was the same two-decoy move that put two tries over Matt Moylan last week that got Niukore over in the first half, and the Kiwis just kept punching the bruise, but around Jarrod Croker this time.
The two are parts of the same whole. Canberra’s defence has kept them in games – mostly in staving off comebacks – and their attack has often misfired, but been saved by exceptional short kicking. Fogarty leads the league in kick try assists.
The tackling was there, especially from Kris, who saved several on his own, but they weren’t able to stop the best of the Warriors.
In attack, the issues that have shown the Raiders at their worst were still there. They rarely shifted in good ball, repeatedly choosing to hit lead runners in the back row rather than test the edge defence.
The fight in the Raiders is such that they kept going to the end and made a contest of it. But deep down, they’ll know that their limitations were shown up.