BY DAN

The Canberra Raiders have allegedly entered the fray for the services of Stefano Utoikamanu, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald. They join the Panthers, Roosters and Storm in this battle, and combined the lightweight logic of bringing him to town, makes this feel an unlikely venture. Look! Out there over Lake Burley Griffin! Hovering in the morning fog is that most wonderful Canberra winter phenomenon, the Raider Raise.

The case for the Raiders being in the mix for Utoikamanu are fairly straightforward at face value. He’s really good at footy. He’s been a shining light in an otherwise dark universe at the Tigers in recent years, emerging as one of the game’s elite props. He’s played Origin, and while he wasn’t really in the mix this year, that’s as much to do with the fact that the Tigers haven’t lived up to the hopes of revival that had been pinned on Benji Marshall and the boys shoulders.

Utoikamanu’s contract expires next year, but also 2025 is based on an option, and that means he can leave if he wants. The Tigers have offered him a five year deal worth a squillion dollars which he rejected, indicating my guy doesn’t have the patience for the battle with the organisation anymore. The Panthers, flush with cash from losing Matt Burton, Viliame Kikau, Stephen Crichton, Api Koroisau, Jarome Luai and James Fisher-Harris in recent years, are understandably keen to restock the fridge so to speak, particularly in the middle. The Roosters want him to replace Jared Warea-Hargreaves, and like the Panthers are not short cap space with Joseph Sua’ali’i going to play amateur sport and hang out on yachts and Luke Keary retiring. The Storm just desperately need a middle, because Nelson is angry but ain’t that guy anymore, and the rest of them are just dudes.

For the Raiders the given reason is replacing the Big Papa, who is probably ending his career in 2025 but that’s more circumstantial than anything. The money isn’t entirely equivalent – my guess is Papa is still on good coin, something approaching 750k for next year, and the contract Utoikamanu just rejected was 800k a year over five years. So it’s not a straight swap. Add on top of that a Canberra tax, and you’re probably looking at needing to find somewhere between an extra 200-250k a year to get in the game. That’s nearly a whole other player.

Canberra also have plenty of people already with the club making a play to replace Papa, and basically all of them are contracted in the long-term to the club. Corey Horsburgh, Ata Mariota, Trey Mooney, Morgan Smithies, Pasami Saulo, Emre Guler, Vena Patuki-Case and Myles Martin will all be middles in the top 30 next year alongside Joe Tapine (and maybe Hohepa Puru if he picks up his option). Only Guler and Patuki-Case are theoretically off contract in 2025.

The point is the Raiders probably already had a middle too many, and other roster problems to address, when they signed Morgan Smithies in the offseason. Adding another to the pile isn’t really possible without more than Big Papa walking out the door. So it seems more likely that if Canberra are interested it would not just be to replace the most handsome prop in history. Would the club swap Guler for Stefano? Probably. Is that likely? Ah well, that’s a less fun conversation.

One could argue that the investment in youth is how Canberra have gone about fixing their roster problems, and that when it comes to ‘pay the piper’ on turning ‘potential’ deals for Stewart, Sanders, Martin, Tamale, Matty Nicholson etc into ‘star’ deals, that the roster may have thinned out, leaving Utoikamanu as the king middle that would be a perfect match with that generation. It’s a plausible but unconvincing proposition, but even the most jaded and negative fan can admit there’s an appealing logic to it.

It’s hard to say if the club is actually interested. The Herald thinks so, but Christian Nicolussi spends so much time fluffing players and officials recently it’s not hard to think he’s producing copy instead of doing actual reporting. His article says:

Sources with knowledge of Utoikamanu’s contract negotiations not authorised to speak publicly told this masthead the Raiders were ready to negotiate as soon as he became a free agent.

Given the Raiders have no knowledge of his contract negotiations, and his agent does, I reckon we can go ahead and say this is info fed to the Herald via the wonderful medium of ‘text message from a player agent’. I’m not saying the Raiders aren’t interested – it’d only be doing their due diligence and we already did the proof for it’s plausible if imperfect logic. But it’s pretty clear that this expansion of the pack to include the Milk has not come from them, and is deliberately driven at inflating his appeal to the clubs currently chasing him.

Ah well. It’s been a while since we’ve been down a path like this. The Raiders have spent so much time in recent times finding treasure where others feared to tread that Lara Croft is giving them side-eye. It’s nice to see them back in the regular world, being bandied about in the thought bubbles of the Sydney media.

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