BY DAN

Let’s be clear. This was a bad performance before the Dragons surged back into it in the second half.

The Canberra Raiders were well below their best in their 36-26 victory over St George, and the only thing that allowed them to build a 24-6, and 30-10 buffer was that their opposition was not first grade standard. But the longer the game went the better the Dragons got at exploiting the weakness inexplicably cooked into the Raiders structure by their coach. The score got tight, and was only righted when that structural deficiency was finally rectified. Canberra got the win but at the cost of wasting an opportunity to fix their points differential, and building the structures and cohesion needed to be a serious player come September.

Coach Stuart needs to be told he doesn’t get points for difficulty. His decision to start Jack Wighton at 13 and Matt Frawley was as arrogant as it was idiotic. Frawley is an honest footballer, but putting him on an edge with the equally diminutive (and agility-challenged) Jarrod Croker and the inexperienced Albert Hopoate was bizarre. The Dragons targeted that edge like the Death Star did Alderaan. Every set started with punching at the Raiders middle for no reason other than to get the space to shift back to that spot.

At first they broke tackles in and around Frawley and Croker for metres. They didn’t initially come up with points, more out of their own ineptitude than anything. It evidently gave Stuart a false sense of security, allowing him to oddly rest Jack Wighton for the middle forty minutes of the game, meaning the Milk spent a long time with Fogarty, Starling, Woolford, Frawley and Croker in front line defence. This meant every aspect of the Dragons attacking strategy was facilitated by the Raiders – from easy ruck metres to allowing them the space to shift left, to putting Frawley and Croker in a constant battle to bring down bigger and more agile attackers in space.

The longer it went on the better and more confident the Dragons looked going there. When that happened Croker started jumping out of the line in a forlorn effort to make good contact further down the field and hopefully slow the attack. When this was failing poor Albert Hopoate was being asked to solve more defensive crimes than Benoit Blanc. By the end of his stint he was jumping in front of both Croker and Frawley in a desperate and despondent attempt to get good contact on one of the four or five opposition attackers pouring through the area like Moses had told them the sea was starting to look shaky. Frawley created the opportunity. Neither Croker nor Hopoate could cover for him.

The Dragons then started going around. You can equivocate about who to blame specifically but they all started there. Yeah Croker shouldn’t have dropped the kick but he was only taking it because Hopoate had been forced to make a tackle he or Frawley should have made. Yeah Ravalawa’s pass was probably forward, but he had gotten a free run of forty metres because poor Bert Hopoate was busy trying to both cover in and out – a little brother stuck in the middle of the big brothers game of keeping off. Three tries came in six minutes. That’s what it took for Stuart to act.

And then it was fixed. Jack Wighton came back on, went to his usual spot. Jordan Rapana was shifted across (probably just to spare Hopoate any more emotional damage). The tap was shut off (for the most part). The Dragons kept making big metres through the middle. They’d gone from being demoralised to more stimulated than a meth addict in a moshpit. But with the return of normalcy the Raiders defence righted the ship, they got down the other end of the field and sealed the game.

A performance hasn’t been hindered like that in the pre-game since Commodus gave Maximus a pre-battle rib tickler. It hurt on the other side of the ball too. Canberra’s attack pulled together 36 points but outside of getting Matt Timoko early ball (which, turns out, was a very effective idea) there was little structurally impressive to see. Frawley’s presence on the left robbed the Raiders of one of their most threatening and consistent attacking shapes. Instead of Jack Wighton being a star around which defences orbit, everyone spread, and Young, Croker and everyone else had no space.

The Raiders instead manufactured points because Matt Timoko tears through defensive lines like Godzilla through cities. In the past he’s ‘sonned’ singular players, but for a time in this game it felt like he was doing it to an entire side. If the Milk hadn’t became caught up in the mess of its own making he might have had a historic night. No one could stop him. He was powerful and elegant, a ballerina and battering ram. 221m, six tackles breaks, three line breaks and two tries seems to underscore how ascendant he was. Rapana’s opening try came because Timoko bore a hole through the defence. He nearly scored himself going through again, running across the field looking for someone to fight, finding the fullback and only just being taken down. He scored minutes later when put in a similar position, only with less wiggle room for the custodian.

It made the Raiders right-side attack infinitely more impressive than the slow left side. Timoko was supreme, and it meant that Rapana got to do Rapa things, Fogarty made a host of breaks and half breaks, and even Elliott Whitehead turned back the clock, continually getting between defenders and making half-breaks and getting Timoko into space. It looked best on his first try when quick hands from Smelly and Rapa were the reason he had a clear run to the line (save for the speedbump that awaited him at the goal line).

But the Raiders went away from this, purely driven by a complete lack of ball as they capitulated in the second half (in two different ten minute periods in the second stanza they had less than twenty per cent of the ball). After Timoko’s early dominance Canberra’s points were as opportunistic and individualistic as they ever are. Matt Frawley scored because Jamal Fogarty (again) hit the post with a perfect grubber. Joe Tapine did an acoustic remix of his semi final try against the Roosters, dancing across and through some effete defence with equal parts ease and disdain. Timoko’s second came after a Fogarty kick, a friendly bunker read of a Rapa pass/drop/something and another Frawley kick. Seb Kris iced the game because the Green Machine finally got ball in good field position in the second half, chucked a shift rightwards and nearly scored. A look one way from Zac Woolford (who played many minutes and was very good), a pass the other and no one could be bothered to tackle Seb Kris.

The ease at which some of these points came should have underscored the situation for the Raiders. At 24-6 and 30-10 there was an opportunity to push for 50, and halve their poor points differential situation (much like they did at the back end of last season). Instead they fucked around and found out, and all because their coach was too much of a coaching genius to recognise putting two slow and small defenders in the line together was a poor idea, or that putting five defenders under 90 kilograms in a defensive line was, like most things out of the 1970s, past its use-by date.

So instead of heading into the bye with a skip in their step they’ve instead got a stick in their head. The wins are critical for a competition more bunched than grapes and while scientists are continuing investigations the preliminary results are that winning is better than losing. But at some point this side needs to develop a functional and structural attack. At some point it needs to learn how to grind a side down, not punch them in the face and then invite them in for a foot massage and Barry White. This was a chance to do this but they were robbed of it by themselves and by a Coach stubbornly determined to do things the hard way, like he’s watched the idiot-bro-motivation-cypto influencers and actually believed their bullshit.

There’s a bye, and frankly that’s the best news. It’s bizarre to say about a side that is eleven wins and six losses on the season, and has won ten of twelve games, but they are running out of time to fix what ails them. Their defence is still messy. Their attack is still incoherent. They still rely on individual efforts, which is the legacy of 2019 but without the resolute defence to match. They still have too many moments in games where they lose sight of what they should be doing.

Canberra need time on the field doing things the right way. Instead they keep dropping chaos into the mix, like it’s an 80s movie and the punch is tasting bland. This game was the perfect chance to do things the right way and build a foundation of good habits for September. Instead they yet again made a mess of things, this time because the coach failed to put them in a position to succeed.

But if Stuart’s behaviour in this game is anything to go by, maybe he doesn’t think they have any issues to solve.

And boy would that be a problem.

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