BY DAN

Sometimes you just can’t outrun your demons.

The Canberra Raiders tried. Oh how they tried. In their 30-22 loss to the Redcliffe Dolphins they scraped and clawed desperately to try and thieve a victory they probably hadn’t earned. But even their best efforts were undermined by their flaws. Now they are left standing alone, season on the precipice. There’s a way back, but it will take more than hard work.

The Raiders brought their baggage to the game. Errors and idiocy have made the season harder than it needed to be in the early part, but in the last month the injury list has suffered a surgical strike. This was made worse by Origin selections, and the last-minute absence of Seb Kris. Canberra didn’t so much have makeshift edges, but entirely new ones.

Earlier in the week we’d talked about the challenge of Ata Mariota or Jordan Uta having to play on the edge against the scheming of Isaiya Katoa. Kris’ absence meant that the Raiders rolled out a right side of Hosking-Laurie-Savage-Stuart. That was not part of the plan. Hannibal Smith would not be pleased.

If you don’t have good edge defence, you need to counter in the middle, but Canberra’s ability to do that has been limited too. Jayden Brailey at 13 in a pinch is a solution, but for near 70 minutes it comes with limits. He can make good contact, but he can’t dominate bigger players. This puts more pressure on the normal middles to provide body-doubling for him and the other rake, or it asks him to be that support for the other rake.

Neither are great outcomes, and it contributed to the Raiders barely being able to hold the middle through the opening stanza, as well as directly to the try of Morgan Knowles, where Felise Kaufusi was able to hit a line and offload in a tackle where Owen Pattie took legs, and Jayden Brailey, being asked to do the impossible, was unable to physically control the upper body of the bigger man.

That’s not to say it was Brailey’s fault. It is what it is at the moment. You could have hoped that the other middle forwards would have made bigger efforts, but that’s hard to ask of people playing 55 plus minutes (72 in Joey Tapine’s case). It put a huge amount of pressure on the makeshift edge defence to hold the line. And well, that went about as well as a wet fart in a sauna.

The right side was the most problematic. Four of the five Dolphins tries came on that side of the uprights, and most involved a torture of Daine Laurie that seemed so cruel that Isaiya Katoa decided to inexplicably not attack the weakness for near 30 minutes of the second half. Thank Christ for the Geneva Convention, otherwise this could have got messy.

One try came with when Connelly Lemuelu right an inside-shoulder line Laurie failed to pick up. On another he jammed in on the backrower and the ball went outside. After Katoa gave him a break and the game got close, he decided to end the farce and let Brad fucking Schneider ran hard at Laurie and the game was over.

Daine may cop the blame, but it underscores how much Canberra ask of their edge defenders, and how much they rely on people like Ethan Strange and Hudson Young to clean up messes created elsewhere. Laurie’s job wasn’t made easier by having Xavier Savage as his outside help. Indeed, Laurie spent as much time covering out as in, and did make a great tackle to take Tevita Naufahu out late in the game.

And it would be remiss of us to leave out that the other try came when Matt Timoko panicked so fully and openly that he jumped in front of Ethan Sanders to defend a backrow line as the ball sailed past to the outside backs. Canberra actually had the numbers, just not the nouse.

The pressure on the defence was only made worse by some awful handling errors. Tamale was electric when he held the ball, but in the first half he got lost under the high ball (and even dropped one in yardage cold). His drops gave the ‘Phins the possession that became two of their tries. Daine Laurie errors preceded two of the others, and on both he made the handling error, and the defensive error. Shit, you could even say the other try Redcliffe scored came from Raiders errors – even though it was just Jed Stuart desperately knocking down passes to prevent overlaps.

This mix. This disgusting mix of errors both handling and defensive. This inability for the middle to dominate, exposing Canberra’s wounds and weaknesses to the festering air of reality. It reeked, like a Maccas at 3am on a Friday night when someone has lost their late dinner. It’s remarkable in a sense it didn’t get worse. The Raiders were outgained by 500 metres. Their opposition had twice as many line breaks. Six full sets more with the ball. It should have been a million points to zero.

But it wasn’t. They found ways to score. On their first set they targeted a shift of Laurie running at Schneider, the beginning of a poetic bookend. Late the first half they scored with an excellent movement to Tamale who made two defenders look stupid on the way to the line. It was so good to see Joey Tapine’s perfectly weighted pass for Sanders on the run-around, and also Matt Timoko’s ability to catch-pass the ball quickly to Tamale. That all started with a gorgeous Sanders pass to put Tamale into space. It was a shame they couldn’t get back to that more often.

Partly that was because they spent so much of the game trying to get out of their own half. 54 minutes into the game they’d been tackled 23 times in the opposition half, and it was well past the first 30 minutes of the game before they were tackled in the red-zone. Sanders and Owen Pattie (in his opening scene cameo) made great decisions to kick, mostly executed, but weren’t always matched with the requisite chase ($15 short? That’s exactly what Ethan Strange and Hudson Young’s marshmallow squares bring in).

But when they got there, they seemed unable to pair straight runners with shift movements. They could either run straight at the line, or shift sideways. You gotta do both, as the ‘Phins backrowers showed. This put so much pressure on Canberra’s second receivers to be perfect or operate with no space or time. The connections simply weren’t developed enough for that. Passes hit the ground, attackers were jammed, and more sets ended with either Laurie, Sanders or Weekes running sideways, or catching the ball standing.

And when it was all balled up together, Canberra were chasing a game they couldn’t control with a set of players who were in the wrong positions making errors on both side of the game. They couldn’t muster a consistent attack, and spent the whole game chasing. Another team would have given up and in Vlandoball’s true style, lost 48-16. But this team refuses to give up. They’d rather run directly into the moving car than accept that the car might have right of way.

I hate this team, but I also love this about them. They played horribly. They could barely muster an attacking raid in the cramped spaces of the redzone, but they absolutely refused to give up. It won’t mean they’ll be a premiership contender this year. Shit, unless they get reinforcements soon they’ll be hard up to have 17 players for next week. But whoever walks out there does everything they can to win the game. It’s just that they sometimes also help lose it.

That’s our lot this year. It’s a work in progress. A roster that is improving, fits, starts and all the sputtering. Good players are getting better. Great players are off playing Origin. The poor performance of the early season has met with the tide of player drain and the Raiders are struggling to tread water.

Execution, precision. Excellence. These are things built with consistency – of the game style, of the players involved, of skill. Unfortunately the Milk are building, but the payoff is being held back by timing and circumstance. Maybe it comes later this year. Maybe it’s too late. Maybe it’s next year. There’s something worthwhile building here. But the devil can’t be paid with promises. You can only take him down with perfection. Right now, Canberra aren’t close.

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