Fading Raiders Fulfil Nightmare Prophecy

Something's up. A team can't be that good for the first 40 minutes and then so bumbling, pumpkin-headed and borderline effete for the next 40. What is doing? And can a Major golf champion help?

Ian Baker-Finch once dreamed that he would hit the ball out of bounds while playing the Open Championship at St Andrews with Arnold Palmer.

When the great IBF - winner of the 1991 Open Championship, known as “The Dark Shark” as heir apparent to the Great White One, and, an interesting and quite cool thing, a subscriber to this newsletter and an owner of The Milk – duck-hooked his tee shot out of bounds on the first hole at St Andrews in the ‘95 Open - while playing in Palmer’s last trundle around the famous old links - Baker-Finch wondered what fresh hell is this?

His bad dreams were becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. They became actual things.

“That’s when it got scary,” Baker-Finch told me for A Short History of Golf. “When my nightmares started playing out right in front of me.”

And as his ball traversed two fairways before coming to rest 150m away to his left near the lobby of famous Rusack’s Hotel, Baker-Finch began to fear that something was not right with his melon.

He could smoke it on the range. Destroy the field in Pro-Ams and practice rounds. Get onto the first tee in a tournament and turn into Unhappy Gilmore.

Good times for the Dark Shark; the 1991 Open Championship. Pic: PGA.org.au

Raiders fans could empathise. For Shaun Johnson potting a field goal to beat the Raiders in Golden Point on Saturday afternoon at Moreton Bay Stadium was a nightmare scenario many of us had actually played out in our mind’s eye pre-match.

So much that I almost bet on it happening. I only didn’t because it seemed too obvious. That the Raiders must be due, surely!, to put together an 80-minute performance, particularly against a side pumped by 60 points the week before.

Alas, instead, you know what happened: a slow-motion car wreck in the second half as The Great Prophecy became Nightmare Fact.

Analysis of that in good time.

For now, straight to The Whinge, and the cynical bruiser Matt Lodge, who elbowed a player in the head and stayed on the field and then, rather than thank the league gods, copped the barest brush of a forearm across his own face and stayed down, holding his jaw, his team down by two in front of the posts, allowing the judges in the bunker to rewind tape and deduce that, technically, it was a penalty, when during the normal – that is to say live speed – run of play it’s just play and don’t stay down you giant lady’s blouse something.

You know what I mean. Because fuck that. Are we rewarding that now? Seems we are.

Yeah good. Pic: Fox Sports.

Rugby league has so often dissed the football Australians and Americans (and Canadians, too, one assumes) call “soccer” for players play-acting to win penalties and free kicks and cards against their adversaries.

But rugby league can’t do that anymore. Because it’s a rugby league thing now. Because we all bayed for consistency and the bunker-men slowed down the video and saw a technical head-high tackle that Lodge didn’t require HIA for.

And here we are. In hell.

And this after these same optometrists had watched Lodge raise a forearm and connect flush with Corey Harawira-Naera’s jaw. And then they watched the same play, in slow motion, however many times - six times? 10? - and saw it again and again: raised elbow, flush to jaw, defender in distress. And they decided the bastard should stay on the field.

Maybe CHN should’ve writhed around as if harpooned. Maybe Mitch Barnett was unlucky that he didn’t rip off his action a week after Lodge’s bit of kit, he could’ve gone to the judiciary and claimed precedent.

Now: did Lodge’s play win the Warriors the game? In a harum-scarum, mistake-riddled second half, you could make a case that it did. Certainly helped. Big factor.

(Click here to The Milk’s Brisbane book launch.)

Mainly, however, the Raiders headed into the second period of the match hoping that they would not “fade” as they have done and as they perhaps feared they would. And like IBF on the first at St Andrews, they did that which they feared the most.

There was more to the match, of course. You can check all the the stats and fuck-ups on NRL.com.

But to paraphrase lead singer of Irish rock band The Cranberries, Dolores O'Riordan, it’s their head, in their head. Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie, oh. Do, do, do, do

And so on.

Early doors, Jack Wighton was on. I texted a mate: “We have got this bastard - Jack Wighton is on.”

He texted back: “Shaun Johnson’s going to kick a field goal in golden point.”

No he didn’t he wrote: “They play like this for 80 minutes they beat anyone.”

And that, sports fans, remains true. They’ve played high-grade footy for long periods against Storm, Penrith, Sharks - everyone. They can outplay them all. They just can’t do it for long enough.

For just as Ian Baker-Finch could shoot 64 in a practice round and 84 the next day in competition, the Canberra Raiders have choking, fading, losing, call it what you will – in their very heads.

And it will be one of Ricky Stuart’s greatest coaching performances if he can extract these people from the pit of inward-looking angst that has characterised their second stanzas.

Not sure if the club should take Baker-Finch’s course of action. After missing 22 cuts in a row including the ‘95 and ‘96 Opens, Baker-Finch fronted up crazy-brave to play in the 1997 Open Championship at Royal Troon.

After shooting 92 in the first round and pulling out, he lay on the floor of the thankfully empty Royal Troon Champions Room and wept. And it was about then that he decided to brush competition golf and do something else.

 “The end analysis now is that doesn’t bother me anymore. But at the time, in ’95–’96 it really did bother me. I loved the game and I couldn’t figure it out. I wore myself out mentally and physically. I would hit 100 drivers a day, every day for the year in 1995 and I’d go to the first tee and snap it out of bounds.

“So that’s not a swing issue, that’s a mental issue. But all of the swing coaches would look at my swing that I hit out of bounds, and try to ‘fix’ that. But that wasn’t really my swing. It was a mental issue, a fear, a fast transition, whatever you want to call it,” Baker-Finch said.

What to do? I don’t know. My only coaching gig was the 2017 Allambie Jets U/6s, which came with its own challenges. Those people were crazy but at least they didn’t think much.

But I’d do this: bring back Jarrod Croker, play Josh Papalii and Joe Tapine for 65 minutes and give Xavier Savage a roving commission in the middle whatever the number on his back.

I’d also pray at the altar of Jamal Fogarty’s knee.

And I’d dare to dream. Even bad ones.