BY DAN

The Canberra Raiders have been exposed! Their faults have been discovered! A brazen weakness. Stop the 2026 season, because the Milk are apparently done, and we haven’t even started.

It’s so, so dumb. Even for rugby league headlines. And it shows a real problem with the rugby league media.

I refer, of course, to Fox Sports’ ‘finding‘ that the Raiders have missed the finals the year after making them nine times in the NRL era. That’s the most of any team, and therefore evidence of a “bad habit” that risks them being bundled out in 2026. Oh well, may as well not turn up.

This is embarrassing analysis, numerology so bad you’d expect it from 90s morning TV. It reflects a period in the mid 2000s (one that we’ve written about) where the Raiders would outperform their roster every other year, scraping into the finals on the back of a late season run. They didn’t win many finals in that period (huzzah to 2012), but they did make sure they were competitive each year, no matter the limit on their roster or the lack of healthy Terry Campese that they had to endure. Sometimes they managed to do enough to get into the finals. Sometimes they gave it a real shake.

Then things happened. Sometimes it was injury (like to Josh Hodgson in 2018, Terry Campese in 2009 and 2011). Sometimes it was a roster ageing out (like 2013) and a new coach coming in (like Neil Henry in 2007, and David Furner in 2009). Sometimes it was because they weren’t actually that good the year they made the finals (like 2004 when they made the finals winning only 11 of 24 games and having a negative differential) and being found out the following year. There were reasons – actual, factual, not superficial reasons – that would make for interesting discussions, if you had the time or interest.

It draws false equivalence between what has happened and what is now. It’s utterly irrelevant to this side, who have made finals five times in the last seven years. Who have built a squad in recent years replete with talent building towards something bigger. They may not make the finals this year. Professional sport is like that. But it won’t be determined by something Matty Elliott did in 2005. It will be determined by the effort they put in through December and January. It will come down to the coaching staff’s ability to overcome the weaknesses of 2025, to evolve before other teams react to their strengths.

Forgive me for being idealistic, but if this was about discovering some sort of truth about the Raiders, or the competition, the analysis would have been about the Raiders’ good habit of outkicking their coverage through the 2000s. It would, as we wrote here, talk about Coach Stuart’s tendency to build teams in cycles, squads peaking in 2019-20, 2022-23 and (hopefully) beyond 2025. It would acknowledge that the team with the lowest number of times missing the finals was the Tigers, because it’s been a fucking decade since they made the finals. Oh well, at least Fox isn’t absent-mindedly kicking Wests for clicks. Maybe we should be grateful for small mercies.

But this is not about truth. This isn’t meant to be a thoughtful piece. It’s meant to engender a reaction. If that reaction is “geez this is fucking dumb”, it’s just as good as “wow that’s insightful”. Our media should be capable of discussing this beautiful game with the complexity it deserves. Unfortunately the business is built on people slowing down to watch the car crash.

But this weight to bait has real ramifications. The season is about to start and we don’t know the rules. That should be every rugby league reporter’s focus right now. There should be endless articles about V’landys seeking to change the rules, whipping his rhetorical device out of his pants in January only for it to turtle into February. Fox Sports should be camped on V’landys’ doorstep demanding answers, instead the only answers they are looking for come from asking their boffins in the ‘lab’ to look at old ladders and look for patterns with childish wonder. Rugby league is better than this. The Raiders are better than this.

Fox Sports isn’t.

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