BY DAN

The Canberra Raiders had defended their line for the best part of ten minutes.

Not in a hyperbolic sense. For more than ten minutes the game had been played almost exclusively with the Knights attacking the Raiders line. Newcastle had gotten repeat sets through well weighted kicks, putting more and more pressure on the exhausted Raiders defence. Canberra kept holding on and holding on.

Finally, a grubber hit legs and they somehow came up with the ball. It was downright inspirational, keeping themselves with a snifter of a chance, if they could just get it down the other end.

And on their second tackle with the ball they dropped it.

Again they mustered courage better than Kiss From A Rose, finding a way to keep the Knights out for yet another set. They finally got the ball back got through another few tackles. Deep breaths. Get to the kick. Get out of our own half.

And then they dropped it again.

It was a bridge too far. On the next set the Knights scored from dummy-half on the goal-line. It was a non-traditional barge over. The Raiders had zero markers, and the ‘A’ defenders were so far from where they’d normally be that you’d probably more accurately call them Bs. Elise Simpson, the fullback, was over at ‘C’, not a place you’d normally find a fullback on the goal-line. The dummy-half picked the ball up and basically took two very chill steps forward, the defence parted like Jehovah was helping Moses out.

Canberra were just too cooked to get into the right positions. It wasn’t because they weren’t trying, or because their defence was fundamentally flawed. But their inability to perform basic skills consistently put such pressure on every other bit of their games that something was going to break.

The score became 18-0, and given how the Raiders were struggling to put a dent in the defence, the game was done.

In this game, at least, there was no question that they were trying. They were committed. They made 80 more tackles than their opposition, only had 44 per cent of the ball and spent the vast majority of the game defending their own line. But their inability to complete ate them alive, not just robbing them of opportunities but also putting so much pressure on their defence.

The worst thing – every week – is it’s not young players, or new players. Experienced players were the ones making errors, a frustratingly compounding factor and an exposition of a squad that is just short on athleticism, and talent.

The following all occured in the second half alone. Kerehetina Matua took a fourth tackle kick out of panic, and then dropped the ball the next time the Raiders got it. Chayelle Robins-Reti made two handling errors herself, and threw a terrible pass to Jordan Preston for another one. She also set up bizarrely wide in defence to create the gap that became the Knights second try. Sophie Holyman dropped two passes, including the aforementioned ‘second drop’ that led to the final, game-sealing try. According to the stats they made 15 errors in the game, and I counted at least nine in the second half alone.

There was a period where they weren’t dropping the ball. In the first half they went set-for-set with the Knights, and even camped on the Newcastle line for periods. They got there mostly through the good work of penalties and Simaima Taufa (god give us 13 of her and we might have a chance). She had 135m (55 post contact), twice as many metres as the next Canberra middle (Grace Kemp had 65). Leianna Tufuga was again impressive.

In this period they got into position, but were incapable of taking the next step. They seemed caught in two minds between crash plays and trying to play extremely wide. The weather didn’t suit the latter, and it exacerbated just how un-introduced and slow their structured footy appears this season. Once the ball is two passes wide it feels like no one is moving at pace. Utilising their backrowers on harder ‘in’ lines would be an obvious way to provide more space.

Through the middle though the play is too one-out. Any interplay between the forwards brings with it risk of handling errors, but they can hardly make more than they do. Maima and Kemp are doing so much of the primary carrying that there’s no option outside of them to let them either tip-on or offload to. Matua was meant to be a factor there, but she’s been gallingly ineffective, unable to stay on the field (or allowed? I’m not Darrin) for any period of time. In that regard I’d love to see Elise Simpson around the ruck more than she is.

So even when they were handling ok, and competing set to set it felt unlikely they would score. When possession tipped hope became despair and concession inevitable. They have the dubious honour of being the first team in NRLW history to not score for two matches, and that even obscures that they didn’t score in the second half of the game before. Their handling is such a problem, such a restriction, but also such a basic issue, that I’m not even sure how you fix it. Do they need to run drills? Is that something (semi) professionals do?

Look, it’s not a good time for the NRLW Raiders. If their problems were attitudinal before, as suggested by Coach Borthwick, that is not the issue now. The issues are now in athleticism, skill and strategy. These things are harder to fix that switching the ‘give a shit’ switch to ‘on’. Barring some minor miracle it’s hard to find them winning a game or avoiding the spoon. Maybe trying is the best we can hope for.

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