The Joy of Six-from-Six: Raiders to chow down on sea birds of the beaches
The Raiders are one win from a spot equal top of the table. Manly's missing their best prop and have won four games all season. It is round 12. We're on a roll. We're going six-for-six.
WE’VE GOT THESE PEOPLE, these so-called northern birds of the beaches. Got them, as Bill Lawry would say, yes, like a feral cat carrying a twitching native sea bird with the fangs of its blood-soaked maw.
Our house. Sunday afternoon. On a roll. Colder than Krakow by night. The visitors’ form line strong in 40-minute bursts, like stun-bumbled dromedaries in other stanzas.
Two of our guys, Hudson Young and Corey Horsburgh, are pressing for state jumpers. Two others, Jack Wighton and Josh Papali’i, have worn so much rep kit they’ve decided to dedicate themselves to the club, the town, to each other, for the rest of season 2023.
And that, sports fans, augurs well. Word for the day: augurs. For even if others (read: bookies) don’t believe, our Canberra Raiders – fact – believe believe they can win the 2023 NRL Telstra Premiership.
And why not them? Why not them across three games in September?
Consider: Raiders beat Eels who beat Rabbitohs who beat Panthers who beat Roosters as royally as they beat Raiders.
A week after that evisceration the Panthers flogged the Sea Eagles while the Raiders beat the Broncos to set in train a five-match winning streak which has Canberra one win outside 16 points and equal-top of the table.
And yet - I don’t care but yet - we are $41 with said makers of book while Brisbane (who we beat) is $7, Storm (who’ve lost to Sea Eagles, Titans and Bulldogs) is $7.50 and Cronulla (who we also beat) is $9.
Penrith and Souths are first line favourites, and fair enough. If the grand final’s tomorrow, those people are in it. But we’re level with Broncos and Storm. Get on the big overs while there’s still time.
In the meantime get on us Sunday afternoon at GIO Stadium. Because it all points to the joy of six-from-six.
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AS WE KNOW, however, things, like words in that song about words, don’t come easy when following this Green Machine. They’ll make us work for it as they themselves work for it.
They can be hot enough to put 24 points on within a half-hour, cold enough to let the other mob do the same because … well, I don’t know. Sometimes I think they’re too nice to press their boot on the throat of their bleeding opponent. But it’s probably more that they’re very tired.
Because from the outside looking in, and it’s most if not all of us, we can forget that it’s actually very, very tiring to play rugby league.
Running very fast and tackling 110-kilogram human beings who are running very fast generates quite a lot of painful lactic acid, the chemical the human body produces when cells break down carbohydrates for energy, it says so on the Google.
When a halfback is described as Nathan Cleary often is, and as our opponent Sunday often is too, Daly Cherry-Evans, as “kicking a team to death”, it’s because they’re able to turn and burn their opponents, who are forced to run towards their own line for long distances, and run very hard yards back.
And for forwards it’s far more dispiriting running towards your own line than the other mob’s, a truism whether you’re Taniela Paseka of the Manly Sea Eagles or Wayne Hickey of Canberra Royals’ sixth grade, a loose-head prop forward who so loved rucking that he once raked the six-inch long studs of his high-ankle Adidas boots down the plump white flesh of my inner thigh on a very cold morning at Philip District. That we were on the same team mattered not to our ‘Hick’, so much did he love rucking pin-heads.
Regardless, Wighton and Jamal Fogarty are in hot form and on the back of our forward pack’s superior go-forward will do to them as much if not more than Cherry-Evans will do to us.
We’ve got the birds.
Believe it.
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THAT SAID AGAIN, Cherry-Evans is a champion. As Ricky Stuart said last year after the halfback so torched us in Mudgee, the greatest legacy the Immortal Bobby Fulton left for Manly was Cherry-Evans with a 10-year contract so juicy he pulled out of an agreement so deep with Gold Coast Titans that he’d bought a house at Mermaid Beach.
But the halfback doesn’t have enough mates. ‘Turbo’ Tom Trbojevic is unable or unwilling, it comes to the same thing, to stretch out and run at the speed he was once so highly capable of.
He’s still great. Still dangerous. Still capable of 150 metres and a couple try-assists. But he’s a shadow of the powerhouse that won the Dally M in ’21.
His brother Jake Trbojevic is back and that’s always a fillip for the Sea Eagles, the Mona Vale man is the beating heart of their club.
But that’s their Big Three. And Fulton has so golden hand-cuffed them all to Brookvale that they’re skinny elsewhere, particularly with Josh Aloiai and Kelma Tuilagi out, and Aaron Woods not playing.
They do welcome back Josh Schuster who’s party trick no-look passes can set his men outside free. But there’s plenty of tired-ass Telly-Tubby about the nephew of the All Black and Newcastle Knights centre John Schuster, and you can expect Fogarty and Wighton to send plenty of hard chargers at the man-boy, see how much lactic acid’s in those 21-year-old thighs.
And thus the acid is on Manly Warringah Sea Eagles and come 5:47pm on Sunday afternoon, I predict that our Raiders 28 will have defeated the ragged birds of the beaches 20.
Up The Milk.