BY DAN

Still living it? Me too.

Look it’s one victory, but it’s a good one. If I was a better writer I’d write sonnets about that game. Compare it to a summer’s day? Turn up the heat. You don’t get to bask in sunshine like too often.

It’s a game that is going to be stripped of context, dragged into meaning more than it can. Mined for data. Evaluated and investigated, searching for a meaning that it can never actually hold. It’s practically two weeks for fans to sit on this high, and two weeks before the goldfish memory of the NRL media will now decide what was bad is now good. Someone is going to say something silly in the coming days. Don’t let them sway you.

But that challenge is for us to manage. The Raiders will have a bunch of their own. It’s rare that you spend an entire week of hype like that. When the whole* world is watching, when you’re on school camp for a week, when you’re spending all that time in a new and exciting environment. There was no need to get up to run out on to that stadium. You could feel it in the team song, in the post game celebrations. Shit even Tommy Starling was basically yelling down the microphone in his ‘In the Sheds‘ segment for Raiders’ social media. The boys were rightly pumped.

It will be much harder emotionally to turn out on a tepid Saturday night at Bruce, or a Sunday night in Sydney (it’s going to rain that night, I don’t know why). Canberra is not Vegas, for better and worse. Northbourne is not the strip. The lights are a different hue. Turning up for round two is something that will actually take work. Coach Stuart is aware of the problem and spoke of the challenge in the post game press conference and noted that the club would put into place a plan for the come down.

It was a week full of great atmosphere…It’s been a wonderful week and we just want to get home…have a bit of an emotional let down from the week, and get home and start preparing for another tough one.

It’s pleasing that they’re aware and have a solution in mind. The difficulty will be exacerbated by the physical impact of jetlag. If you’re not quite feeling up to something, and then add the fact that your brain feels like mush, you might fall asleep at any moment, and you generally have the energy of Jabba the Hut after Christmas lunch, I would presume it would make professional sport difficult.

Even more they’ve lost personnel. We’ve already spoken of how they’ll fill the gaps that will be left by Joe Tapine and Xavier Savage. What’s harder is how that will limit their playing style. The constant changes of direction to target and tire poor defenders will stay, as will the offloads I suspect. But winning the middle will be harder, and the options in attack fewer, without Taps and X in the side. Not to mention the leadership and energy that both bring.

At the end of all this Canberra have the Broncos waiting. I do not know if they are good yet. I think they’ll be better than last year though. With Madge Maguire at the helm you wouldn’t think they’ll have the same on/off button that they’ve had in recent years. That sucks because it means you can’t hope for the opposition to hate Canberra so much they lose. Instead you’re actually going to have to take the victory. They sculpted their game on that in Vegas. Hopefully they can again.

Beyond Brisbane there’s nothing but pain – or more specifically Manly (A), the Cows in fucking Townsville, and the Sharks (shouts to Jack Cronin for doing my homework for me). That’s not a draw you can sleepwalk through.

It’s not the biggest challenge in sport but rather a compilation of little ones. Coming down from a big win in a glitzy foreign land in front of loud crows and bright noises. Try to rev up when all the body wants to do is power down. It’s going to be a big fortnight for the club. It’s moments like this I’m glad a human penny-bunger coaches this team.

The Raiders have conquered one end of the market when it comes to high-voltage games. It’ll be interesting to see how they handle when the lights are a bit dimmer.

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