BY DAN

The run home is here. No more byes between Canberra and the finals. Just hope and circumstance. The Raiders are officially in the top four. The only thing more stunning than that fact is how they got there. Never has the position of a team with so many wins felt so confusing.

The focus over the next seven weeks of football is pretty obvious – make the finals first, worry about the rest later. Canberra have banked eleven (11) wins already, which have been a mix of stunning, chaotic, lucky and silly. They’ve won ten of their last twelve, with an average winning margin this season of 4.8 points, and an average losing margin of 18 points, which explains the minus 55 points differential. For comparison here is the list of teams with a lower average margin of victory, or a higher average margin of defeat, than the Raiders: Bulldogs, Canterbury…..that is all. They’re overperforming their analytics by historic levels, which is either a good sign or evidence that Icarus is getting a bit too much sunshine.

A cursory play with the ladder predictor shows that points differential means the Raiders have to keep winning, both to fix that but also to keep the wolves at bay and ensure their attendance in the finals. The top of the competition is reminiscent of the 2018 ladder, which finished with one win difference between first and eighth. There’s nine teams that can make the eight, and anyone bar the Panthers and Broncos could miss out (well, theoretically anyone could miss out but let’s not get in the weeds). Shit if things go right they could well finish where they are now, which, I mean, jeeeeeeezus.

The point is it’s not enough to coast on the work done. Fourteen wins would normally get you well in the finals, fifteen would get you something around 4-5th place – a home final and maybe a second chance. This year there’s no telling how it will end up. Canberra need to take the foundation they’ve build and add some (insert a building reference here. Someone tell me what you do after foundations? Load-bearing walls? I dunno, I sit at a desk all day. My hands are soft and friendly). And they need to do it fast.

Canberra went in to the bye with the biggest win of their season, which to be honest is part of the problem. Like most games they were better than their opposition for fifty minutes, then engorged in a fiery turmoil and painful capitulation for twenty, before righting the ship just enough. The difference between winning and losing is how much space they put between them and their opposition in the good times, and how much of that gets eaten in the bad. Getting rid of those bad periods would be nice, but at this stage it feels like the kind of feature that would normally lead to a recall (remember when phones were blowing up? Wild). Hoping it’s fixed is one thing. Expecting it to be resolved over a bye period feels more optimistic than buying beach front properties these days.

Coach Stuart seemed to acknowledge improvement was required in his post-match press conference. This at least means they’re at least aware that something is needed. They’ve made good improvements at times this year, most noticeably when they turned around a moribund offence after the first bye week. It would be a useful time to make similar improvements to their defence, their middle rotations, and their ability to use their right side attack in any consistent way. On the plus side they’ve discovered that their bench doesn’t need to be thin, and Adrian Trevilyan is back. On the down side Danny Levi broke his jaw again. Poor guy cannot catch a break.

The fun bit of all this is that the Raiders get an opportunity almost immediately to find out if they’ve improved. Against the Warriors at Bruce a month ago they had their defensive structures sliced and diced like William Halsted on the surgeon’s sugar over the back half of the game. The Warriors are arguably even hotter now, coming off thumpings of the Eels and the Sharks, so perhaps may be ready for a let down (or maybe they’re just hot shit and near impossible to beat in Footrot Flats). But they will have a short turnaround for Friday’s game. The Milk have (hopefully) been scheming and dreaming for two weeks. If (and that if is bigger than the love your Mum and I share for Harry Connick Junior) they’ve made the refinements to their rotations, their defence, and their attacking structures, then they’ll need to prove it right away. The litmus is ready to rock.

If they haven’t it’ll be same old status quo, an ill-fitting implication of stability where almost none exists. We’ll continue to white-knuckle our way forward, hopefully to the finals and beyond, rattling along like a Jamaican bobsled. Hopefully it all holds together.

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