BY DAN

The Canberra Raiders 15-12 loss was a team broken, beaten and scared. Instead of fighting for their season, they begged for it. When it wasn’t offered, they didn’t try to earn it back. They chose shortcuts and miracles over hard work and plans and got the result they deserved. There’s a way back this year, but it requires patience and courage. Nothing from this game suggests they possess either of those qualities.

Before this game we said that Canberra had to show who they are in this game. After last week’s debacle they need to ‘get right’; get their confidence, and a win, to start the process of building a foundation to launch a late season assault. Their opposition were (and are) highly flawed, largely because they have an injury list as large as our complaints about ours. One team has been defined by those injuries. In this game, the other overcame them.

We had hoped the Raiders would win this game through the middle. And the good lord knows that Joe Tapine (17 for 170m) tried to do this. He looked like a lonely man, leading from the front as his colleagues cowered behind rocks. He made massive efforts with the ball. He made important tackles in defence. Shit he chased down Josh Addo-Carr. It should have inspired the rest. Instead it just put them to shame. Corey Horsburgh did useful work through the middle too. Between these two, and some useful work from the other middles – Vena Patuki-Case didn’t look out of place – Canberra did enough to create the necessary space to attack.

The problem was what happened once that occurred, which was a masterclass in poor decision making and worse execution. Their sets seemed to work by rote, rather than by any particular sophisticated reading of the play. Good runs by middles weren’t taken advantage of. So often they shifted late in sets for the sake of it, unable to work out why there wasn’t any space on these forays. As often they careened back into defenders after earning the right to run away.

And even when they made the right direction and tenor of play, their execution was askance, driven by halves searching for a miracle rather than trusting the process. Ethan Sanders threw multiple impossible passes; one bouncing off Matt Timoko’s admittedly hard hands, another nestling safely in Josh Addo-Carrs hands. He kicked early in the set for Xavier Savage, who may as well have been at another game given how far off the play he was. It wasn’t the only time, and the game was laid to rest when Daine Laurie threw a pass to him on hope, only to find Savage was twenty metres behind the play.

These moments reflected a mindset of panic, of lack of assurance. Of fear. Of halves with no trust that what they were doing would result in points, so instead they reached for honey and came up with ants. Everything was slow, and instead of taking what the defence was giving them, which was huge space to take on the line between the three and four men (in from the wing), they instead kept pushing it wider, and perversely into help defence. It created an insipid attack. The Raiders had more tackles in their opposition half, and in their red zone, than the Eels did, but created fewer tries and generally looked less likely to score.

Sanders, and Laurie, both had poor outings. Sanders also added a series of atrocious attacking kicks to the mix, which is becoming a habit that has to be reckoned with. There’s a lot of pressure on the young half to bear this season, particularly without Ethan Strange around, but these haven’t been difficult things he’s failed to execute. He hasn’t been asked to complete high degree of difficulty tasks. But instead of doing the easy things well, he keeps playing like he’s trying to do a backflip before doing a box jump. Laurie at least presented a viable threat to run, though he didn’t use it half as much as I would have preferred.

What made this mess worse was how unsupported they were by more experienced players around them. Tom Starling offered nothing around the ruck. Jayden Brailey actually took on the line more often, which usually opens up a defence, but his lack of creativity at 13 means that either he runs or passes. There’s no mystery in that machine. Ata Mariota looked like a prop playing backrow, disconnected and tentative as an edge runner. Towards the end of the game he tried to be more use by taking runs in the middle. But all it meant was that he wasn’t there on the edge when Sanders thought he would be.

And even when they did get it right, they only got it mostly right, which wasn’t enough to post points. In the backline Timoko offered hard runs, and Kaeo Weekes did his best with not much space to create. Between the two of them they created multiple opportunities, of which the Raiders took 65 minutes before icing one of them. On the other side Zac Hosking was a threat running off Laurie but too often he would get between defenders, and there would be no one in support for his free arms to find.

And then the rest of the mess. On the other side Savage had six runs for the entire game. 53 minutes in, my game notes say “X’s first run?” and I think I might be right. That’s inexcusable. Jed Stuart did little but drop ball and make defensive errors, blowing one try, dropping a ball in open space, and generally offering no threat. If Sav Tamale wasn’t coming back next week he should still be sent to Cup.

The Raiders looked disjointed, disconnected and disinterested in doing it the hard way. There was no commitment to the bit, no urgency in their play. Maybe that’s why Sanders and Laurie were shooting for the stars, because they didn’t trust the ground crew to the necessary work. Indeed it wasn’t until Owen Pattie came on to the field, sped up the service, tested the opposition markers, and kicked smartly from nine, that Canberra attack picked up pace and started to spark.

It was too little too late. Three tries and a field goal were too much of a lead for their uninspired attack to chase down. Canberra’s season was on the line and instead of scraping and clawing for every inch, they looked for short cuts at every opportunity. There was no patience. No sharpness. They didn’t run like men playing for their season. They were throwing haymakers like Mooseheads at 3am. Any frightened boy can attack. A brave man knows how to wait.

In the end the result didn’t matter so much as the substance. Canberra played afraid. Tentative and unsure. Scared of a hard run, a hard decision, they looked for shortcuts at every opportunity. Their opposition were not good and are not good. But they were not scared and that was the difference. In contact sport you can play happy. You can play angry. Mean, friendly, fucking up at 110 percent. But you can’t be scared. And the Raiders are.

Turning this around requires small steps and hard work. But in this game, and so many this season, the Raiders have shown a reluctance to earn their way. Scared of what it might reveal about where they are. Well, there’s no hiding now. There’s no pretense that 2025 is a good week away. This mess needs cleaning, and there’s nothing to do but grab a mop and bucket and start grinding. You can’t be afraid of a little hard work.

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