Jack Wighton loyalty the reason Raiders beat Phins - and everyone else
Jack Wighton's off to pastures he considers greener and that's fair enough. Until then he's the Raiders'. He knows he owes. It's why he gave up Origin. And he'll tear out all year. First up, Phin Soup
And so to the sin city (well, sin town, even charming sin hamlet) of Wagga Wagga for the Dolphins, hopefully ragged chunks of Dolphins, in a soup, a big bloody soup of half-dead dolphins like in that Bay of Death in Japan where fishermen steer dolphins into a bay and then spear them because they are nice to eat.
Interesting, isn’t it, which mammals humans deem cool to eat and which we treat almost as equals, feels like the smarter or larger the animal the less we’re likely to kill and eat them, which is why (ironically quite smart but disgusting) pigs and dopey old cud-munching cows are given less respect than the mighty Wright Whale or the Arctic fox.
Regardless. We beat Redcliffe Dolphins in Wagga Wagga because – and you may have read a thing or two about him recently - Jack Wighton.
Because Jack Wighton, friends, is going to run out on McDonalds Park like a berserker. He will score a try. Setup two more. And lay on a series of mighty front-on shots that deadest dare the Phins fast ones – lookin’ at you, Hamiso ‘Hammer’ Tabuai-Fidow – to run into his channel.
Big game from Big Jack coming up, you dinkum heard it here first.
Why so? Because loyalty. Wighton wants to repay. He’s spent 14 years of his still-young life – nearly half of it – in Canberra within the Raiders system. He knows he owes.
It’s why he’s given up Origin: so he can go out a winner with Green Machine. Or at least go out having left nothing on the field but bloody flecks of himself.
Why’d he leave? Few reasons.
Man’s only 30. He’s got 3-4 years of functional footy in him. He’d be thinking – and I don’t know, but I’d surmise it – that grass on the other side looks greener.
Not to say it’s not groovy in Canberra. He could be happy in Canberra, for sure. Canberra’s his family.
He just thinks it looks better in the eastern suburbs of Sydney where he can play with his mates who are equally shit-hot at footy.
When he spends an hour getting to Surry Hills for a coffee and can’t find a park, see how he green it is then. But it’s true the beaches are nice, if massively overcrowded.
Will he have more a chance of winning a premiership? According to bookmakers and sundry experts, yes. And maybe it’s true.
Yet as Hudson Young told The Sydney Morning Herald, Wighton’s never actually uttered those words. And Wighton’s going to try like all get-out to win a premiership in his last season with the club he’s bled for since he played baby Raiders out of Orange in 2007.
They’ll scoff in Sydney, of course. They’ll scoff in Brisbane. But we’re about a third of a way into a competition that’s more a 7000 metre steeplechase at Warrnambool than a Golden Slipper sprint for two-year-olds. And shit will happen along the way.
The beast of State of Origin could take out Latrell Mitchell, Tom Trbojevic and Nathan Cleary for the season and one hundred per cent root the premiership aspirations of Souths, Manly and Penrith.
For example.
And Jack’s not playing Origin. Instead he’ll be fresh every week. Off the piss. On the property. Knowing he’s got five months of footy in front of him with the club he’ll be known as a great thereof. And if you boo him you’re a bubble-head.
So we beat the Phins. We just beat Brisbane Broncos (the $3 favourite to win the job lot) the other day, in Brisbane, as foreseen as if by the magic of druids in these very pages.
The Dolphins welcome back Felise Kaufusi who’s a belter and in the Victor Radley Zone for referees, and they have a big pack full of hardheads who run straight and hit hard, imbued with Uncle Wayne’s special man-sauce, and the Raiders will have a job to do against them.
But Jordan Rapana’s back packing punch from the back, something, and the forward pack is in form and will be right up and in the face of the very scary Bromwich Brothers and company. And we should’ve beaten them in Redcliffe, and they gave up 26 points to Gold Coast Titans, and we’re at home in our satellite sin hamlet.
So there is all that. And, as ever, there is our man Ricky Stuart, who will have told his people, if they didn’t already know, that the bastards don’t respect us. And you know what else? Win this and we’re on 10 points. Cronulla Sharks won last night and they’re on 12 points. Which is second on the ladder.
And down the track with a dose of luck we run into sixth or fifth even fourth on the NRL ladder and then go on a roll deep into the guts of the National Rugby League’s finals series.
Again, they’ll tell you bullshit. Ask them to bet their own money on it. Test the courage of convictions. They’re certain of a thing? It’s easy money, right? Lot of gibber spoken by types about The Future which, as the kid in Terminator II said, is unset.
Anyway. Know this: It’s tight. We’re in it up to our eyeballs. Don’t let ‘em say otherwise. And take the bets with the odds.
Raiders by 7.
Up the Milk.