BY DAN

The period between the byes has not been the best football of the Canberra Raiders. They’ve struggled with (choose your own order): the loss key of personnel, the drudgery of season, oppositions with lots to play for and nothing to lose. There’s been inefficiency, ineptness, and an incredible feats of doing just enough not seen since I was being educated. And yet the Raiders continue to win. What dark magic is this?

The starting point is to remember that Canberra are a good team. In recent weeks they’ve only had to prove that sporadically. Periods of the game where the Raiders needed their best were 15-20 minutes at most, during which the good guys generally put the other team to the sword. Against the Tigers it was three tries in ten minutes. Three in twelve followed against the Knights. Three in ten broke the game against the Dragons, only one of which was Kaeo Weekes bringing fire to the people like Prometheus reborn.

These periods of avalanche tell a story of a team that can create chaos when it finds advantageous footing. Spot a weakness and hit it repeatedly. In a sense this is a half truth. For example, Canberra had been finding paydirt making Corey Allen, who is a borderline first grader (and origin player, what a time to be alive) make difficult decisions. It’s how the first try of the game was scored, and should have been the source of the second. Sandwiched in between Kaeo going length of the field off a kick (the first one, I can see how you might get confused) and Morgan Smithies popping his Twal, they hit that edge one more time. Essentially they used the weakness to leverage more opportunistic moments into a hail of tries.

In the Knights game something similar occurred, only the plan was different. This time it was the edge back rower surging into the line, dropping a pass out the back and a try being scored. Weekes and Ethan Strange scored off the game plan, leveraging the try that had already come from Simi Sasagi taking a kick out of Kalyn Ponga’s hands. Against the Tigers it was a mix of both plans, with the weakness around Starford To’a and Heath Mason being exploited for two easy movements and one chaos ball try, all in quick succession.

But as easy as those moments are, Canberra have also failed to replicate throughout games. Across the three games they’ve scored three tries outside these breakdowns, and one of those was Kaeo Weekes going the length. In a sense it’s hardly worth noting. Teams score in batches these days, and saying you’re not scoring a lot outside of the periods where you’re scoring a lot is kinda reductive.

But it does speak to how these games have been part time efforts from the Milk. The reasons for this are myriad. It’s not hard to think teams are making in game adjustments, just a moment too late. The Tigers took Heath Mason from the field altogether. The Knights defence is (statistically at least) very good, and has only conceded 30 points once this season. The Dragons didn’t really adjust, just turned to nailing Hail Marys and taking advantage of some weaknesses of Canberra’s (like fielding kicks, apparently and generally paying attention).

It’s also not ridiculous to think that Canberra’s mental discipline has dissipated after these periods of dominance. In the second half against the Dragons they had elite players making rookie errors. Kaeo Weekes dropped a ball at dummy-half on an exit set. Jed Stuart was bamboozled by the bouncing ball of a grubber, and terrified of other bombs coming his way. Jamal Fogarty couldn’t find the corner or the in-goal area with any of his kicks. Instead of putting more pressure on the Dragons, the Raiders gave them chance and chance again to think anything is possible. Just as they’d done to the Knights, and the Tigers.

We should be pleased that when it was needed Canberra were able to knuckle down. The tendency to drift and still manage is one earned by the work of the beginning of the year, and the preseason. It’s also exacerbated not just by the time of the year, the absence of key personnel, but also the gap between them and consequence. They don’t have to win, not in the same way their opposition do, or they have in the past when snatching victories from better teams in doldrums of July. Coach Stuart tried to hit on this in his post match press conference.

we’re playing against a football that’s so desperate, they’re playing for their season. And they’ve got some good footy players, they’ve scored a couple of nice tries off kicks…and it’s hard playing against a footy team like that

Hudson Young, Josh Papalii, and Matty Nicholson should all be available after the next bye. Savelio Tamale should be ready after the last bye (in five rounds time). If they’ve been treading water to get through the middle of the season, reinforcements should provide them with the ability to play fuller, more rounded games that utilise all their strengths. Players will shift to positions that best suit them, and the Raiders could be back to that envious position where Zac Hosking is part of the bench rotation, and Simi Sasagi is surplus to requirements. That will go a long way to bringing back their in-game pace to more up than undulating.

That doesn’t make it any less urgent to fix. Not in a ‘if they don’t fix it now they won’t make the finals’ sense. The Dragons victory makes 14, and that makes the finals every year except 2018. Canberra will be playing finals footy. But if they’ve been treading water for the last three weeks, a break and a ‘get right’ victory or two in the next bloc of work would be nice. But even then the Eels, Knights, Dragons and Manly may be teams that they play ‘down’ to again.

Finals games aren’t won in July. But they also aren’t won with half efforts, ill discipline and wandering minds. Right now this soft underbelly needs to be replaced with Timoko-style abs. Canberra are in a position they’ve earned this year. It affords them opportunities to work through their problems in public, without being castigated for losing. This is good, but it’s not an excuse. The preparation for September has already begun.

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