Slaughter in C-Town: Raiders to cast out demons with Tiger hunt and massacre
Can't lose this one, right? Right??
And so to game day and the maligned and - if we’re honest and we like to think we largely are - fairly ordinary Wests Tigers, who’ll be hosting our Machine at their secondary spiritual base of Campbelltown, a dark and generic stadia surrounded by a leagues club and a train line and so many Dunkin Donuts. Not to knock the place but C-Town aint got it goin on, sorry C-Town.
And yet … it’s been quite the unhappy hunting ground for Canberra Raiders in recent years, and I have had a close-up working view on two occasions.
The first game was actually a win, at the death, when Jamal Fogarty kicked a contentious penalty goal in a game Alex Twal scored a famous first-ever try, a feat rather over-shadowed by the post-match press conference when a pesky reporter - it was me - asked Ricky Stuart if his side missed Jarrod Croker whom Stuart had rested so that the club champion could celebrate game No.300 at home…
Yes, that game. The muppet game.
I had actually asked the question just out of curiosity, almost as a fan - did you, ie we, Stick me old muckah, miss the 299-game goal-kicker and champion? Stick had his response ready. Had it brewing. For, had they lost - and for several long minutes it was looking that way - Stuart knew it’d be coming. And when it was asked, up it came from the bile ducts, and I was taken aback early, though quickly found it amusing once I realised it was effectively one he’d prepared earlier, dear god in heaven love him.
The other time I was there in a working capacity chopping out gibber for the organs of News Ltd - because you certainly wouldn’t have gone there by choice, not that evening, anyway - was the 48-24 debacle this time last year.
Remember that game? How about that game? You wonder how that team could now be this team.
At half-time it was 18-2 and we only scored the two with a Jordan Rapana penalty in the 39th minute. Thirty seconds into the second stanza and Lachie Galvin had a double. Then Jahream Bula scored and it was 30-2. Then Stefano Utoikamanu scored and Api Koroisau scored, and it was 42-8 with 25 minutes to play. And the 10,106 people in C-Town Stadium knew: it is these visiting Milkmen who are the Muppets, not whoever Ricky was railing about last year (Cooper Cronk).
But that was then and this is now, sports fans, and with that debacle relatively fresh in mind for 10 of 17 Milkmen (and only five of our opponents), with our guys riding the lightning and top-five in the league for scoring, tries, goals, possession, completions, line breaks, post-contact metres, tackle breaks, run metres, kick return metres, dummy half runs, offloads, try assists, tackles, kicks and 40/20s - and Wests Tigers topping the pops in missed tackles - if we lose tonight there should be forensic investigation.
Can’t happen, right? It can’t. It simply cannot be allowed. And we can’t see it.
We are good, they are bad.
That should do.
Up the Milk.
***
Busy day at Milk HQ so here’s an extract from The Milk, the book (which has 20 copies remaining if you’re curious) about happy times at Leichhardt in 2016.
JOEY ‘BJ’ LEILUA had come to Canberra from Newcastle Knights with a reputation for being fat and lazy, according to none other than Joey ‘BJ’ Leilua1. But Ricky Stuart got him running, fit and happy like a jolly, athletic Buddha. And in 2016 he forged such a combination with the inimitable Jordan Rapana that they called them by one name: Leipana.
Leipana – the combination yielded 34 tries and 250 tackle breaks, they were first and second in the league. And in the 17th minute of the final round fixture between Canberra Raiders and Wests Tigers on a glorious Spring afternoon at Leichhardt Oval, Leilua pulled a play from his very crazy backside. And it was the very peak of a flat-out glorious year to be a Raiders fans.
See it again:
The home side is trucking it out of their half when Tim Simona – who’d already put the game’s kick-off out of play at the Iron Cove end - takes a pass one off the ruck. Blake Austin rushes the attacker which causes Simona to step and offload out the back of his hand.
It’s a dud play, a dud option by a fellow who would make dud choices in his short, privileged life (and we will talk more of them).
The ball lands on Luke Brooks’ right foot and rebounds to a bad man if you’re a Wests Tigers fan – Leilua, a giant, athletic unit on the charge.
He’s collared high by Josh Addo-Carr but the thin wing meets Leilua’s stiff arm, which holds The Foxx at arm’s length as a man might hold a hessian sack full of prawn heads.
The play would have broken down or gone another way had it been anyone but brilliant, combustible, occasionally crazy-arse Leilua. But it is Leilua. And it is that time. Time for things to get funky.
While still holding Addo-Carr in suspended animation, Leilua is back-peddling, facing his own try-line and holding the ball in a big right mitt. Seeing his man Rapana making tracks to the right wing, Leilua flicks the Steeden behind his back, around Addo-Carr and into the arms of the winger.
Rapana takes the Steeden on his chest and before he’s even touched down is pointing backwards to his centre in celebration, as if to say, Well! How about that for some funky action, sports fans! How the very hell about my man BJ Leilua!
It was peak Leilua. Peak Leipana. Peak Raiders in 2016.
Leilua was, that year, like Mal Meninga morphed with Phil Tufnell: athletic, brutal, skilful, with an occasional clusterfuck in him of epic, comic proportions.
Rapana, too, was prime. Josh Hodgson was humming, acknowledged as the next-best rake in the game behind the Great One, Cameron Smith.
Austin was humming, too, until he was ruled out for the season on August 25. So good was he that he came back to play three weeks later in the semi-final.
The forward pack, meanwhile, as was typical of the era, sported typically monstrous human beings. And this a year before picking up Dave Taylor, a fellow more Kodiak bear than man.
And they probably should’ve won the job lot but Hodgson was injured in the qualifying final and Cronulla Sharks beat them in Canberra and Mick Ennis, in his very annoying way, mocked the Viking Clap before Edrick Lee missed a pass against Melbourne Storm in the preliminary final and swings begat roundabouts, and the ghost of Harold Holt came back from that spear-fishing trip on the southern tip of Mornington Peninsula.
Regardless, it was a super-fine year to be a Raiders fan. So much fun. So much winning. And not just winning but deadest plundering. Pillaging. It was like old Donny Furner had so long ago envisaged when he named the Canberra and District Rugby League representative club the Raiders: the round 26 game at Leichhardt Oval was case in point.
For up to Sydney they had gone, and home with bleeding Tiger heads on top of spears they had returned. Supporters came back sporting the latest in Tiger pelt capes. Women draped Tiger skins about themselves like mink coats.
A convoy of utes, station wagons and panel vans with ‘Sandman’ on the side roared home down the Hume with Tiger tails flowing stiffly from coat-hanger aerials.
Granted, none of that happened. But metaphorically it holds up. For it was an absolute rout of Wests Tigers, nine tries to two, 52-10, it won the Raiders second spot on the ladder and a home semi-final.
And Leilua’s flick was the peak play of a peak game of a great, great season, even without the trophy the Sharks won for the first time in 49 years.
Joey ‘BJ’ Leilua’s full name is Joseph Ikenasio Poiva Leilua Kelemete. He gets ‘BJ’ on account of being the biggest kid in all his junior footy teams. They called him ‘Big Joseph’ which became ‘BJ’.