BY DAN

Canberra have a talent pipeline that should deliver success. But with Brad Schneider’s departure confirmed questions should be asked as to whether the club has the ability to turn this promise into reality.

It looks like the Canberra Raiders are building an impressive talent pipeline. Stewart, Strange, Sanders, Puru, Trevilyan, Savage and Petricevich are all names that could be around the club for years to come. The ability of the Raiders front-office to pull together a level of generational talent has been impressive. The next generation of Milkmen aren’t just ‘good and hope’ players. They are genuinely the best of their age brackets.

Sanders and Stewart are the equivalent of number one draft picks – the players everyone wanted. Puru was similarly drawn to the Green Machine by opportunity, and while not as ballyhooed as the other two, he should have been. It’s rare that a player that young has such understanding of the game. Strange proven his quality relative to his peers in his man-of-the-match performance in the u/19s State of Origin (and subsequent outings in Cup footy).

Talent on its own isn’t enough. The promise of the future has been a key part of Raiders fandom since the golden age. The list of people that might have made it is long and varied, a worthy game of ‘what about that guy’ of its own (shouts to the NRL Boom Rookies). When we get excited about Sanders, Strange, or Savage we mean to connect them to what Stuart, Clyde, and Daley brought.

But we are also echoing the experience of everyone since then that promised us (or rather, we expected of them) the heavens. From Campo to Carney, Croker to the other Carney, Dugan to Daniel Vidot and Edrick and Brenko and that guy who played prop in Cup footy who everyone got excited about because he had some highlights of him running like a madman (Luke Page, but I had to look it up). For years we have believed players could be stars then cursed when they were mere men.

There’s plenty of evidence of promise becoming nothing but frustration for the Raiders. We’d love to wave it away as a matter for the past, but even now the Milk continue to struggle in making the best of the clay they were given (like Clay Priest! Or Clay Webb!). Xavier Savage has gone from the prince who was promised into a Cup winger with no clear path back to first grade. Tom Starling went from ‘good enough to force out arguably the best hooker in club history’ to sometimes bench guy. Adrian Trevilyan is somehow playing Cup footy, despite being heralded by all-and-sundry (it’s me, I’m the sundry). They’ve all been in a developmental stasis, at least in an organisational sense for the best part of two years.

And now Brad Schneider is officially added to the list of halfbacks that have had complicated relationships with Ricky Stuart (or, more likely, the other way around). Aidan Sezer yo-yoed in and out of first grade and then was dumped for George Williams. Williams was sent home. Schneider has been usurped as the future king for another young hope in Sanders. This may prove a smart decision but one would be forgiven for not being certain. Given the Raiders are shifting from an old side to a young club it would be enough to be worrying.

Schneider was once considered a foundational talent in the same vein as Sanders now is. He was good enough to start at halfback through the first half of the 2022 season. By 2023 he was allowed to walk to Super League with little more than a tepid ‘oh yeah maybe we’ll re-sign him in he goes well over there’ from Don Furner. Now he’s going to the Penrith finishing school. It says a lot about the respective place of the clubs that I’m certain that Schneider will be better for being a backup in the Panthers system than he would competing for a starting job in Canberra. It’s hardly the canary in the mine but it is a cautionary tale, coolant for those of us getting hot and bothered about the next generation.

Canberra has done the first part of the job. Get the talent, and starting building with them. But they’ve been here before, both in the past and under Stuart’s watch. The next step, actually turning it into something more than a lotto ticket we hold on to while the team flails about, will have to wait. For all that bringing the talent to town matters there’s still experiences like Schneider’s that remind us that the pathway from potential to hero is treacherous.

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