BY DAN

A weak mind is easily exploited, and a weakness in a football side in one exploited to fit rumours.

Nowhere is this more obvious than Canberra’s tenuous attachment to every hooker that’s ever existed. You saw it with Danny Walker. Cory Paix. Jayden Brailey and Vivian Ward. You’ll have seen the latest, with scuttlebutt linking the Raiders to PNG International Edwin Ipape, currently on contract for 2025 in the Super League. Social media is ablaze…well, sparking a little. But based on what?

Let’s start with the obvious. Ipape is a pretty good footballer. He has impressed when he’s played for the Kumuls. He’s a great ball runner, nimble with his feet and crafty enough in the ruck. He’s had a crack at NRL level before and flamed out with the Sea Eagles, but at just 26 he still has upside worth pursuing.

Would he worth a gamble for the Raiders? Well that’s less clear. Ipape is on contract for 2025, meaning this is a next year thing. By that point Owen Pattie will be Plan A, and any role offered externally will likely be in a supporting role. That’s not to say Ipape couldn’t be a dynamo off the bench, but it does mean the Raiders would be adding uncertainty to a hooker rotation already full of it. I’d assume they’d prefer to have the certainty of a veteran to pair with the potential of Pattie and Packer, but with Danny Levi and Tom Starling leaving, and the free-agency cupboard bare like Old Mother Hubbard lost her job, that may not be an option. All it leaves is a gap that Canberra will need to fill.

That vacuum is how we end up with these rumours. Canberra need something, and people looking to get a foot in the NRL’s door can utilise this to drum up interest. Ipape is off contract at the end of this year, and would obviously be keen to take bigger money closer to home from the NRL than stay in the cold of north England’s second tier competition. But the existence of pull factors doesn’t mean the NRL, or the Raiders are doing the pulling.

Indeed from what we can see in the reporting by The Mole, Zero Tackle, and English sites Love Rugby League and Total Rugby League, they don’t mention the Raiders interest, or at best vaguely reference it in the most passive way. The Mole’s reporting, which seems to be the source of this, reads more like an advertisement than a report. It includes a glowing assessment of Ipape’s skills, reasoning for why he wasn’t seen in international football last season, and most importantly includes the following:

The 25-year-old comes off contract with English club Leigh at the end of the season and is believed to be open to offers from the NRL after four long years overseas.

Call me cynical but this suggests to me that Ipape’s agent is trying to get him back into the NRL more than the NRL is trying to get him back. It’s kinda like a point-and-spray Raiders Raise.

That’s not to say Canberra aren’t interested. They may well be. But there’s little to suggest from this reporting that this is currently on the cards. Right now we’re putting our weight in the credibility of the reporting of someone six weeks from leading us down the garden path on Leo Thompson. And so far at least, we don’t even have a concrete link to the Milk. Until we do we’ll need to treat the Raiders’ connection to Ipape with enough salt that it could clear the snow on a cold English winter’s morning.

But it reflects the problem at the core of this. Until there is more clarity about the Raiders approach to their future hooker position, or at least until Owen Pattie and/or Shaun Packer prove themselves ready enough, the conversation around rugby league will inevitably tie the Milk to any and all possibilities at the position. Being circumspect about those which we entertain is the only way we’ll maintain our sanity.

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