Green shoots and leaves: Raiders have happy ending but starbursts don't mask ice bath of broken dreams
Another season, another ice-bath of broken dreams as your footy team don’t make the Top-8, and it’s all very sad. Well, not like you're fleeing bombs in Gaza, Bubba. But still, dud enough old season.
As ever, along with the detritus and disasters, there were so many green shoots.
The best examples of super-solid defensive starch were in games against the three best teams in the competition, Storm, Panthers and Roosters. The latter two wins late in the piece, and the former a 16-6 loss to Melbourne a week after the terrible night of the long knives at Campbelltown.
Campbelltown? Flat-out hideous. To lose to the wooden-spooners by a cricket score … it’s like … what? You can’t do that. You just can’t make the Top-8 if you’re minus 127 points differential, and you’ve let the baby Wests Tigers run through you like virulent stomach parasites, if you will. Regardless - the black-and-white nature of the Raiders defensive effort week-to-week was … I dunno. It was weird.
It was the same for patches of the first half there at Kogarah-Jubilee. From the first set, the defensive effort was leaky, the hands were bad. Heads were off. It was just ordinary, park footy stuff, a microcosm of the season, as a promising young sportswriter told Aunty here.
But then, second half, the Machine kept on comin’. And they began to tackle like suck fish, and chase Jamal Fogarty’s bombs like devil dogs. And the longer that game went, the more the Raiders were going to win, even if it took the mad red bastard in No.15 hacking a grubber off his shin, an audacious play that was never going to come off unless the ball rebounded into his armpit without him even trying to catch it, is he the ghost of John Bateman?
Maybe he is. Hudson Young might be also. And he has claims. Had a quiet patch mid-season, not coincidentally coinciding with the footy team’s quiet patch. But stormed into the last three fixtures, and didn’t stop having a crack even when he dropped a couple at Kogarah. When he ran a hard and fine angle and burned the Dragons fullback (who should be learning about being a fullback in reserve grade, as Ricky Stuart ordered Xavier Savage) he scored a cracking four-pointer, and they were good times on the eastern hill at Kogarah-Jubilee, as they were in the rain at Brookvale.
So why did it go bad? Fogarty’s injury didn’t help. Then, when the seven was fit, Forever Coach Stuart gave Adam Cook, the NSW Cup Player of the Year, a go in the seven which shifted Fogarty, the fulcrum, wider out among the edge runners of the back division, and changed things up too much. It was too new. And it didn’t need changing-up, anyway, however much Cook deserved a go. Fogarty one off the ruck and launching kicks, and good things came off it. It was working. Reckon they’d have beaten the Dogs with a second-half like that against the Dragons.
Granted, Cook piloted the team in the mighty win over Roosters, and clearly deserved a crack at the first grade seven. But not at the expense of the first grade seven, in my opinion. Thought it before the loss to Canterbury, thought it after. Re-thought it after Cook was very good in the best win of the season, busted and undermanned against the Roosters on their patch.
Stuart’s coached 600-something games of elite level rugby league. Curious that we sideline slobs know better.
And then! After all that, the last game of the season, against the Dragons … shame it was good as dead, the rubber … a microcosm of a season, the front-rowers laying a platform, defensive intensity keeping the Dragons scoreless for 40 minutes, Fogarty raining mortars from the skies, and two bits of brilliance icing the match, and the kid fullback nailing the match-winning goal … how good.
Answer: very good.
Corey Horsburgh? Always thought he’d stay. You look in the eyes, the window to the soul, and you don’t see a lot there except a certain rum-gargling madness, eyes like poker machine reels. But there’s passion there, too, for the club, the jumper, his mates. I like him: he’s enough of a madman that he has X-Factor without meaning it. That’s true X-Factor, when you don’t mean it, things just happen for you. You can’t even say you’re making a decision to do something, it’s more that the decision is made for you, and you just go with it, flat-out.
Top stuff.
Next year? No Elliott Whitehead, no Jordan Rapana, no sad-eyed Nick Cotric, no utility hooker Zac Woolford. We’ll miss ‘em. It happens. Time is undefeated, and all that.
Green machine shoots? There’s a host of hot kids coming through. They reckon the boy Ethan Sanders, a halfback, was pick of the Parramatta litter, while Myles Martin (lock) and Savelio Tamale (outside back) are also NSW U/19s.
Of the incumbents, Ethan Strange and Kaeo Weekes will be another season stronger and better in 2025. Savage will be better too, which is ominous. He had a breakout season. Matt Timoko carried injury in ‘24 but big off season, he could rock-n-roll again. Seb Kris? Like him. But there’s not enough often enough. Feel like he’s on a promise.
The nine? Because I don’t like Fogarty anywhere but one-off the ruck, reckon Cook should be turned into a 14. Though do like Danny Levi complementing Tommy Starling in their yin-yang sort of way. But I dunno. Recruiting Harry Grant probably not going to happen; perhaps there another hot kid Pom in Super League as there was with the great Josh Hodgson.
Regardless, the footy club is now Joe Tapine’s. And he is a bloody beaut, among the best front-rowers in the comp. And the longer they can keep pumping Josh Papali’i full of whatever it is keeps him keeping on, that will be all to the good.
And next year, you’d have to assume, it’ll be something like this year: a team duking it for bottom-four of the top-eight. From there, as they showed against the top-three teams, they can shock the world. If they can stop shocking the fans with big losses to Wests Tigers, it would be good.
As ever, of course, for ever… Up The Milk.