BY DAN

They never stood a chance.

The Canberra Raiders got beaten like someone was trying to get dust out of them. 42-4 doesn’t tell half the story. Nothing worked in any aspect. They were beaten in the middle, the edge, in spirit and in tactics. They were pilloried by a team too skilled and fast that went around them at every opportunity. They couldn’t muster the strength to combat an opposition able to overpower them. Every limitation in the attack was obvious. Every weakness in defence exposed.

The worst bit is that this was built into them. In the structural weaknesses that have been engineered into the roster and game-plan. But also, and more so, exacerbated in the decision making of a coach flailing for ideas in the face of failure. Canberra were set up to fold by their coach and the players will take the blame.

They were on a hiding to nothing coming into this game. They’ve never matched up well with this Cowboys side. The ball whipping left to right to left is something they’re never really well equipped to handle (witness what happened last week against Manly). Playing in the heat of North Queensland has always been a struggle, notably something not reciprocated when the Cows come to Canberra. Bit rude if you ask me. Add to that a side in desperate need of confidence, of consistency, of something resembling a plan and maybe some faith in it. This wasn’t so much the O.K. Corral but Custer’s rag tag bunch of miscreants reacting to the chaos that enveloped them.

To beat the Cows you need settled edges and an ability to take advantage of the opportunities offered by their lax defence. Canberra were set up for neither. Of course this was due to Coach Stuart’s maniacal behaviour on team-list Tuesday. Adam Cook duplicated Jamal Fogarty’s offering, pushing Ethan Strange wide into a newly meshed backline that spent 80 minutes looking like four dudes who all walked in early to the same room for a meeting that no-one was hosting. Fogarty for his part seemed to spend huge portions of the game watching Cook do his job, slightly worse, but with a bit more energy.

For all the talk of getting early ball to Ethan Strange he never saw a pass that didn’t come accompanied by Kyle Feldt or another North Queensland defender. In the end most of his touches came in exit sets. And anytime you can burn one of the biggest talents the club has seen in decades on yardage carries you just have to do it.

And what was worse is it just opened up a big-ol’ can of beans when it came to edge defence. The first try of the game had Cook getting palmed off like a teenager (please just admire that double entendre) by Jake “I was playing Q Cup a week ago” Clifford, outmuscled where his predecessor would have folded the ball runner. Five minutes and Stuart’s gambit was proven foolish. I could have told him Tuesday (hey wait I told him Monday, and then also Tuesday).

A further try came later because Hudson Young made a tackle, leaving Elliott Whitehead and Cook both watching Scott Drinkwater make them look like statues. Strange got beat on one scrum play, made the wrong read on another, and two of the Cowboys seven eventual tries resulted.

On the other side an early HIA for Elliott Whitehead meant Simi Sasagi had to play big minutes early, and for some reason – my presumption was to really dig into whether he could work it out on the edge – kept him there after the Englishman returned. He did not thrive. At one point he had sixty per cent of Canberra’s handling errors (not joking real stat), one of which directly became a try to kill whatever happiness still remained in our lives even the most outlandish hopes of a comeback.

But in defence he was weak, and put pressure on a similarly limited defender (but obviously critical attacker) Matt Timoko to clean up messes that aren’t normally his responsibility. On one of the Cows nine line breaks Drinkwater simply ran outside him, taking advantage of the space Sasagi offered him. In Simi’s defence it’s a job he’s learning, and his poor line speed was characteristic of the team more broadly.

And it was a relentless attack on the edges. If the Cows managed to win a ruck with enough venom to drag edge defenders inwards it was a greater certainty than death or taxes that they’d go right back at that hole. They wouldn’t stop there, pelting that edge like a teenager with eggs and a dream. It put pressure on people like Simi, Cook and their brethren to be better defenders than they are. Could Smell, Strange, or the injured Zac Hosking have changed the result? Probably not. But lord it would have been less embarrassing.

The surprising bit of all this was the middle was unable to make a substantial impact. Hudson Young was again impressive, cracking 200 metres, 80 plus post contact and 5 tackle breaks. But when your edge backrower is your best middle it’s not ideal. Joey Taps (104m) tried. Josh Papalii looked spry in the middle rotation and beat some tackles (it says 1, but I don’t believe it). But apart from that, I dunno man. If you’re a team set up to win by bashing down the front door then stomping on the door while it screams on the ground for remorse, and you don’t in fact bash the front door down, you gonna have a bad time (pizza, french fries). That was a core problem. It made the game tougher on both sides of the ball, and really allowed the Milk to lean in to the problems Stuart created in the team sheet.

It exacerbated their inability to really get the ball wide, meaning Ethan Strange had the best seat in the house to watch the worst thing, like in the next box over at Ford’s Theatre. I guess at least the blood only spattered on him. The Raiders did score off a shift, but the story of that try should have been how they didn’t have the room to do what they did (thank Kyle). Mostly they played ‘face’ to the backrowers, patiently waiting on the platform after the train had long left.

When they did shift they managed to blow a few good opportunities, because last passes were thrown by people too excited by the situation they were in. Timoko threw the ball forward and bungled an almost certain try. Savage threw a ball away late in the game, too excited to take the tackle. Young tapped on a pass that didn’t need to be tapped. Strange similarly tapped a kick to Danny Levi when he probably could have caught it and scored, and frankly why would you trust Danny Levi. In the end they retreated back into what they know, throwing chaos offload after chaos offload, none actually doing much other than delaying the inevitable.

Of course these problems in attack have existed long before today, and longer than this season. The defensive weakness has been there a while too, like a bad houseguest eating all my goddamn fruit loops. It hasn’t been fixed. But it was made worse, so much worse, by what Stuart did to it Tuesday.

And it wasn’t just in the structure and personnel. For 12 weeks this team has been telling itself that what it had in the first quarter of the season was worth preserving. That it was a plan that could result in victory, that then they were a top quality side, so now they could be too. But over the last two weeks Stuart undermined that story. Destroyed their confidence. Made them question what brought them to the edge of the finals, and now cascades them out of it. They played without direction or heart in this game because Ricky Stuart, the coach of this side, told them he didn’t believe in them. It’s not surprise they showed the resilience of a tomato.

If there is a a silver lining to the torrential rain pouring through the hole in Canberra’s ceiling it’s that Stuart surely must know these beleaguered panic-plans cannot work. They are now 86-16 since HIA pushed Ethan Strange to centre. Add last season’s 48-2 against Melbourne with Strange at centre and forget causality, I’d not let him play there just for the bad vibes.

In the post game conference Stuart said everyone has to have a look at themselves. I hope he does too. At halftime he (according to Brent Tate at least) said the edges needed to ‘talk to each other’ better. I hope he realises that disconnect existed at his behest. He has overseen this mess, both in terms of the structural and game plan limitations cooked into a team that can do better, and through the rash decisions he’s made in deploying his resources. 400 years of capitalism couldn’t have planned the obsolescence of the Raiders season as well as Sticky did. He is being, and will be in perpetuity trusted to fix this mess. I hope he gets 360 degree feedback because whatever is being done isn’t working, and he’s making it worse.

If the season wasn’t already dead then someone has come in at set the body on fire just to make sure. Canberra can now look to 2025 to solve these problems. For us that is sweet release in a sense. No more pretending. Book your flights people. I’ll be in Bali for preliminary finals. Better take a jersey so I can get one of them to sign it.

For the Raiders though this should be a cold warning. Not that we expected to be in Canberra in late September. This team wasn’t meant to fulfil our hopes this year. Nonetheless an opportunity has been wasted. To succeed, to build, and to learn. Much of it out of their own intransigence, which cannot be allowed to continue.

There are other lessons that can be mastered in the next few weeks to deliver benefits in 2025. Better get to the drawing board. The season is over. There’s no time to waste.

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