BY DAN

The Canberra Raiders have had to do a few endings recently. Jarrod Croker, Jack Wighton, their premiership window, Sam Williams. Add Elliott Whitehead and Jordan Rapana to that list.

This wasn’t so much directly announced by the players but flagged by Coach Stuart in this piece in the Canberra Times. In talking about the opportunities for Chevy Stewart, Xavier Savage and Ethan Strange, he casually dropped the following:

Over the next 12 months we’re going to be transitioning into a new era. We’ll be losing 1000 games of NRL experience with Jarrod and Jack leaving this year, Elliott and Jordan being their last season in ’24.

Stuart to the Canberra Times

Rapana and Whitehead are ending their careers and suddenly a thousand games doesn’t seem like such a long time. It’s a strange thought that these people come into our lives and give us so many chances to appreciate them. So often we’re brazenly focused on on-field results we don’t realise these repeated exposures bury them into our hearts and minds forever. Neither Rapana nor Whitehead were sure things when they came to the club, but both won us over through a mixture of determination and will-power that could power a city (and did, metaphorically…although…Albo look into it). Like most relationships the longer they go the harder it is when they end. It won’t be easy when Smell and Rapa hang it up.

Both will be appreciated in their own way. Elliott for the way he fixed every problem presented with. Need a backrower to cover for defensively-weak halves? Check. Need someone to fill in at halfback because your halfback is an injury hold-out because the club won’t let him go home? Check. Need a new captain because the old captain won’t captain anymore? Check. He’s part handyman, part war-time leader. All the time making the Raiders better by doing literally everything no one else would do.

Rapana’s end, should it come, will be a maturing process for me. With Rapana it always felt like anything was possible. Like his partner in crime BJ Leilua, he had the audacity to walk on to any field and only see possibility instead of limitation. Maybe it came from a lifetime of walking the tightrope of fate and succeeding. Maybe it came because there was no other choice. If you don’t believe you can do it, who will? Jordan Rapana believed in himself, and I did too.

The Times and Stuart are right that this is generational change. By the end of this season it will mean that Papa, Taps, Emre, Horse and Nic Cotric will be the only remaining players from the 2019 grand final squad. That’s not ridiculous change (and some may say slower than it needed to be) but it is substantial. Tapine is now a clear leader from that era, the only remaining elder statesmen assured of an every week starting spot (I think Papa is definitely that this coming season, beyond that, well, I want him to play forever but I guess we have to be reasonable).

That era has been ending for some time. This is more the final polish on the statue they deserve than stone to be sculpted. We’d argue there’s been three phases of the Stuart era. One in which our dreams were built. A second in which they almost came true. And a final one in which we desperately hung on, like that bit where you wake up *in* the dream, suddenly conscious it *is* a dream, and desperately hang on to the moment as reality drags it away. Once Smelly and Rapa are out the door the Raiders will be bright awake, pouring themselves and coffee and wondering why the kids are being so loud (I love the idea of Daddy Taps looking around as Stewart, Savage and Strange run around making a racket and thinking “man good kids but I wish they’d let me finish my coffee in peace”).

I hope Stuart isn’t going off-book here and that these conversations have been had with Whitehead and Rapana. Elliott makes sense. As we’ll cover in the next few days, this day has been coming for a while. The dude has done literally everything for the club, and his bones are weary. He needs a spell, he needs rest. Put him in a good paddock and make sure he gets the post-career care a club legend deserves. Rapana i’m not so sure about. I don’t think Jordan will ever want to stop playing footy. He’ll be putting a step on the orderlies in the nursing home, palming off doctors and being both a menace and hero for the residents. At some stage he’ll stop but I am still not convinced it will be by choice. There’s every chance if he stops playing NRL it’s because he’s dragged off the field by his own club or by the judiciary.

But despite my hope for his reluctance the time is coming too. It would be nice if these departures to not have the Hodgson/Charzne/Sammy/Jarrod ‘tinge’ to them. Much is made of Stuart’s man-management; it might be his biggest strength. He gets players up for games, he makes them believe. I wish he could also make them feel appreciated as they walk out the door.

For Whitehead the replacement isn’t clear (something we’ll touch on in the coming days). For Rapana there’s positional replacements (pick two from Schiller, Hopoate, Cotric, and Savage) but none will have the joie du chaos that Rapana brings. There’s questions to be answered, and with Stuart flagging the end there’s an implicit understanding that he has the paper out and is scribbling. Lord knows he’ll never show us his working though.

Succession planning is Stuart’s problem. Ours will be saying goodbye, again, to more faces we’ve known a long time. 1000 games was nowhere near long enough.

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