Raiders to demolish Warriors, among exclusives revealed in odd little e-forum known as The Milk
Yes! We’re back in the saddle and gibbering about the trials, travails and greater glory of these our Canberra Raiders. And we'll be doing it twice a week until the Raiders are no more in season 22.
And so to New Zealand Warriors at 3pm on Saturday afternoon at the stadium once named for Stanley Bruce, 1st Viscount Bruce of Melbourne, eighth prime minister of Australia, leader of the Nationalist Party, survivor of the front at Gallipoli, an interesting man you should Google him, but which today is named for the GIO Insurance company whose jingle once went, “It feels good to know, that you’re covered by the GIO” in advertisements which showed calamitous things happening to people, one assumes people’s fear of “What if” drives quite a lot of, if not all, insurance sales.
And, breathe.
Yes! We’re back, trendsetters, back in the saddle and gibbering about the trials, travails and very greater glory of these our mighty Canberra Raiders. Had a hiatus for which I apologise (jobs of paid work took precedence over Milk matters) but as they said in the hit film Lethal Weapon II: “We’re back, we’re bad, you’re black, I’m mad”, which is a cracker of a line in a particularly good motion picture of its time. Peak Mel Gibson before he went all drunk and weird and hating on Jews, the silly moo.
Anyway. The Plan going forward for this odd little e-forum is to preview and review of each Canberra Raiders NRL match for as long as they live in this footy season. The latter bits of kit will be made easier given I have a gig writing match reports for the wire services of a little company called News Ltd. Thanks Uncle Rupe, I didn’t mean any of it.
Ha.
Right! Yes! The Warriors at GIO Stadium and, for mine, we annihilate them. No, fuck it - we do. We kill them. We destroy them. They will leave Bruce, as raspy-throated Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) warned his men in Platoon: in a body-bag.
Granted, yes - this is a game we’ve often dropped. We beat the big dogs in their house (in your face, so-called Melbourne Storm) then turn up at home against wooden spoon wannabes, lead 24-0 at half-time, have three players sin-binned, lose two scrums against the head before going down in golden point to a drop-kick that came a minute after the siren and missed by three feet.
Not funny cos it’s true.
But no - that’s what They want you to think. And to Hell with Them. What is going to happen is that Ricky Stuart, our man, will have spent the entire week putting The Ordinary Fear of God into his team by threatening to play the music of Russell Crowe’s band of that name (though it might also be Thirty Odd Feet of Grunt, he’s an odd enough bird, too, our Rusty, thought not as as odd as Mel Gibson who a fellow I know would see at the Coogee Bay Hotel in 1977 drinking other people’s beer).
Anyway - the Raiders are going to smash up New Zealand Warriors because the run home begins now. The Raiders are on that run. It’s what they do. This time of year, after being below meh, sub-meh, the worst kind of meh most of the year, cometh the post-Origin period, in which they were afflicted only a tad, so the unbeaten run begins.
And so it begins … now, with New Zealand Warriors who sit 12th on 12 points on the NRL ladder. The Warriors are worse than meh. They’re sorry-not-sorry flat-out shit-house. They’ve won five games all year. They’ve put pining Reece Walsh on the bench. They haven’t won in Australia since Round 8 in April when they beat the, er, Canberra Raiders in Golden Point, a performance Don Furner said was the worst he had ever, ever seen.
Maybe not ever, ever seen. But ever seen? Words to that effect, friend, and we heard him say them at the Brisbane launch of The Milk at the excellent Paddington Hotel prior to the great thumping of Sharks at Suncorp in May, they were very good times, we got a limo to the races.
And we will see good times again Saturday afternoon because hungry Jack Wighton will be wearing No.6 against someone called Daejarn Asi who is back at five-eighth for the Warriors after 10 weeks out injured, a move with forced Stacey Jones to shuffle Chanel Harris-Tavita to fullback and for sad-face Reece to ride the pine.
And thus I foresee that Raiders 36 (Jack Wighton 2, Hudson Young, Nic Cotric, Elliott Whitehead, Joe Tapine tries; Jamal Fogarty 6/6) defeat Warriors 0 at GIO Stadium, take it to Sportsbet they will give you quite nice odds.
In other news, The Milk the book is still available in hard copy (and author-signed, Father’s Day is a-coming, the people, you know what to do) at mattcleary.com and TheMilkbook.com for $40 including postage, or as a Kindle e-book via the Amazon for $8.36 which to me seems criminally low.
But there you go - digital talk is cheaper than that which is published on paper, and that’s the damnable space publishing inhabits, there was a time magazines would fly you to Tahiti to play golf, a true story, today you’re flat out getting a Murray’s Coach to Canberra to cover the Panthers.
But! In a not coincidental segue that’s what I will be doing on Saturday 6 August at 5:30pm after a lunch and Raiders talk and book signing affair, watch this space for details thereof.
Right! Thanks for your time, the people. We’ll get back to you with a match report after the demolition of once were Warriors.
And bye for now.
Up The Milk.