BY DAN

Recently Coach Stuart made comments about how proud he was that he now had so many players involved in the end of year representative football. It was a juxtaposition with a consistent and infamous refrain from early in his time coaching the Milk. In that period he would lament not having representative footballers, and how the best teams need multiple origin players to be successful.

At the time we took the complaining about lack of rep footy players as a deflection; an attempt to pass the buck or avoid blame for the frustrations of 2015. Now it seems a more complex conversation. The changing nature of international rugby league has made the definition of ‘rep footy player’ wider and more varied. Origin players is probably still a useful measuring stick, but even as Stuart has noted over the years, Canberra can’t really sign Origin players, so making rep footy players, often people without the eligibility to play in those games, is the name of the game.

In truth, apart from the 90s, Canberra has never been stacked with players that please the pickers of representative teams, particularly not in the positions that matter. Sure, the Milk have had their fill of big names, usually in the forwards. But it’s been a long time since they’ve had someone cooking in a spine position with an ability to alter the entire trajectory of a game. Here’s the list of Canberra spine players that have made Origin or Tier 1 nations this millennium: Terry Campese for a game… Josh Hodgson, despite running into Wayne Bennett’s myopic view of what a rake could do.

It reflected a challenge that was beyond just missing out on representative players: a lack of game breakers. Players that upend conventionality, turn what is possible on its head. Make the hard bits of football seem easy (and on occasion, the easy, difficult). The Reece Walsh’s of the world, for whom categorisation feel like trying to describe a smell. Those for whom what had come before isn’t really relevant. Rep players are important, but players like Walsh who are unfathomable can be the difference between finals and finally.

Canberra have had conventional brilliance before. Josh Hodgson built on the mould of Cam Smith. Josh Papalii and Joe Tapine have been the human foundations every success is built on. Jack Wighton approached this space, but despite his Dally-M and Clive Churchill medal, it always felt like he wanted to break the mould but was smashing at it like a chimp to a monolith. Only Terry Campese, and for a brief period in 2008, felt out-to-box uncapturable. Fire as human. More of a concept, an idea, than a footballer.

These sorts of players are rare. The conventional brilliance of a Nathan Cleary, a Michael Jordan, a Gary Abblett Jr is more common. Build on the shoulders of giants, do everything that right way, the smart way, perfect the perfectable and win until it makes you sick. Be electric, but in the way that light houses and makes fridges work, not in the way that makes hearts run and hairs stand on end.

But players that can explode in a moment is a more nebulous and impermanent pursuit. That’s what makes them so spectacular. This is a different kind of brilliance to the Nathan Clearys. It’s different, more jolting, less able to be defined, repeated, tending towards soaring highs amongst maddening nothings. Reece Walsh made more than five errors in each of the Broncos finals wins. No one would pretend he wasn’t the best player on his team in those games. Steph Curry sometimes randomly throws a pass into the crowd. The rest of the time he’s making your author cackle with the audacity of the possibilities he sees. Buddy Franklin made the hard bits of AFL seem easy (and the easy bits seem hard). It’s players like these that alter the chemistry of your brain and the structures of the game as they tilt the planes of existence.

If you’re lucky you get one or two in a lifetime, or even dashes of it at different points. Sometimes a player finds this for a period, then loses it just as quickly, chasing the high the rest of their career. Walsh’s finals might be the equivalent of Joe Flacco’s 2011 playoffs, in which the Ravens quarterback, an otherwise middling player became god for four weeks, before returning to the mortal realm. It might be the start of something more permanent; establishment of a fire burning bright that lasts for a decade.

For once though, Canberra may actually have talent with a mind-shattering ability to tip the scales like a god rendering judgement. Ethan Strange and Kaeo Weekes are singularities; accelerating beyond control of our ability to understand them. Strange, part rhinocerous, part dragonfly. Bouncing across defences, through defences, around defences. Anything and everything is possible when he was even a modicum of space. At just 21 he’s not anything near what he could be, and already so much. With the potential and power in his hands it seems like he could break the game, almost absent mindedly.

Kaeo Weekes also has the potential to be a game breaker. In 2025 we got to see what this may be like. His speed was almost cartoonish, to the extent that in games it was sometimes a surprise he didn’t leave tread-marks in his wake as he cut through teams. When he got the ball he certainly fit the criteria of excitement; electric and chaotic, dancing and darting. When he took his opportunity to score at Magic Round, when he defeated the Dragons almost all by himself, he showed and proved a game-flipping ability to rival any in the game. And it was only his first year in the position that now seems so obviously his.

These are two players who have something undefinable about them that may be more than just perfecting a craft. Something inherent in how they play footy, a potential and possibility unlimited by the confines of our petty imaginations. Strange and Weekes can be earth-shakers, like Walsh, Johns, Steph Curry or Franklin before them. There are a lot of factors that will determine if the Raiders ever win a premiership. Having players with the ability to break the game will be one of them.

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