When the Milk torched the Bulldogs on a cold night at home
In an extract from Matt Cleary's book "The Milk", we hark back to a cold night in 2012 when the all-conquering Bulldogs came to town after winning 12 straight, and were sent home to think again.
WE were hurtling south on the M23 as a wild westerly buffeted the vehicle and shook the snow gums like so many cheerleaders’ pom-poms. The Great Dividing Range loomed high to our right as we careened into the mist that hovered over Lake George. Overhead were clouds full of tiny ice shards, sitting low and malevolent like trolls of the sky. Sky trolls – you don’t read about them often.
Everything was cold. The hills were cold. The white line in the road was cold. The sheep were statues.
“It’s like Loch Ness,” said my pal, Matt Logue, who was covering that night’s Raiders-Bulldogs match for Rugby League Week. And I thought, I may use that for later.
For I, too, was covering the fixture in my guise as League Week’s ‘Man on the Hill’. It was a cracking gig. You’d go to footy, drink beer, eat a hot dog, take notes about whatever you found entertaining. Then I’d go home and write up a treat.
My mate, the editor, Mitch Dale, had given me license to kill. Don’t worry about ‘style’ – just bring the laffs. It was like being John Bateman turning up from England and Ricky Stuart telling him, Just do you, baby. Just do you.
Gee it was a good gig.
I’d stand on hills and barrack with the nutters. There was a guy at the old Parramatta Stadium would get about in a Mexican wrestling mask. There were 60,000 people at Eden Park, all of whom it seemed had been drinking all day, and all yelling, “Cop thet, Shullungten!” when David Shillington was whacked by Ruben Wiki in the Test.
I drank stubbies of Tooheys New perched on the mighty boughs of the Moreton Bay fig at North Sydney Oval. I’d support each team for a half, and cheer them both on, depending on certain gambling permutations.
But that night it was all sweet Machine of Green. And it loomed as – give us your best Ray Warren – a cracking fixture. The Raiders had won seven of their last 10 including three on the trot. They’d put 40 on Melbourne in Melbourne and flogged Cronulla 36-4 at whatever Shark Park was called that week.
The Bulldogs, though, were on fire. They’d won 12 straight. Des Hasler had their big rigs humming. And in bouncing Ben Barba they had the best and most livewire, exciting player in the comp.
But they were coming to The Graveyard now, baby. And locals knew: they will freeze their very rings off.
We rolled up to the ground and the parking blokes were dressed like Scott and Amundsen, or an emperor penguin dextrous enough to dress itself in a big puffy parka. It was colder than Glenn Close taking a screaming kid on a roller coaster, colder than Krakow by night. Cold? Frozen ice planet of Hoth, friend.
Frozen ice planet of Hoth.
Then the wind picked up and screamed in off the Brindabella Ranges, the snow-topped blue peaks locals call “The Brindies”. This was not the West Indies. We bumped through the turnstiles as Woden Valley Rams sold raffle tickets and a cow sold milk.
We passed the statues of Mal Meninga and Laurie Daley. There were great steel cables and concrete abutments, and kids rugged up like their parents had taken them to the snow and left them there for a week’s survival training.
And then we were in: Canberra Stadium, today GIO Stadium, a very fine stadium. Plenty of standing up and seated areas near bars. There are inner bowls and a mighty Mal Meninga Stand. Men stood in clumps and leaned on railings, tinnies attached to lips like old mate from Dumb n Dumber sucking on a pole.
But what are you going to do? For just as when you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dyin’ day, when you’re a Canberra fan you freeze your ring off. Artists starve, politicians lie and bitch and lie again.
And fans of the Canberra Raiders freeze their bottoms off. The Queen said grief is the price we pay for love, and who would argue? She was Queen for 70 years. She freakin’ knew things. And Raiders fans know this: the price we pay for love is freezing our arses off.
Good grief it was cold. We rolled into a fine inner-bowl seat on halfway where I bumped into an old mate from Royals, Mark ‘Obi’ O’Brien. Obi played openside flanker, holding onto the scrum with his one arm. Made tackles. Carted the ball up. Great fellah, the Obe.
He offered a towel to wipe dew off my seat. “Hope we don’t have to throw this in later,” he said and I scribbled his gag down in my notebook. And I thought, here’s hoping. Because those Dogs were good.
James Graham, Sam Kasiano and Frank Pritchard were doing things with the ball men of their size weren’t meant to do - playing with it. Barba was having one of those years, an absolute ball-tearer. Barba was ridiculous.
But the Raiders were a little hot right then themselves. And 13,158 sports fans put on the Antarctic tourist kit and came out to see what they would see.
Out came the Dogs in their blue tuxedo T-shirts, and we booed because they were so very good. Kick-off and Kasiano carted it up before being tackled by a mini goon squad and hauled towards touch, sliding through the dew and rumbled over the sideline. And we were all up around the ground, roaring like Romans. Yeeeahh.
Matt Cecchin played The Grinch, though; ruled penalty Bulldogs. And we were all up in arms: What is the meaning of this? This is an outrage! Rubbish, lies, a crime against humanity, and so forth, in the mad way of the fan.
The Raiders sustained pressure with repeat-repeat sets and earned a result when Sandor Earl fell on a Josh McCrone grubber. Jarrod Croker converted. Earl’s head came up on the big screen and a woman nearby said, “I would totally tap that.”
Eleven lords a-leaping! It was cold. There were people in hats from South American high country. There was a guy with a macramé tea cosy on his head the shape of a German war helmet. You wondered where he got it. If he’d asked his mum to knit him up a lime green Nazi soldier’s helmet.
Josh Dugan! The rangy wild-child busted the Dogs, fed ‘Grease Lightnin’’ Reece Robinson and there was a very fine tryyyyy. And were all up again and leaping about like tossed salad in the inner bowl.
Obi and I clocked the great, woolly man from Merseyside, James Graham, having a breather on the bench.
“Have a go at the moon tan on him,” Obi remarked.
“He probably thinks it’s hot,” I replied.
“Bloody good player – for a ghost,” Obi said.
“James Graham, the Unfriendly Ghost,” I replied and we cackled like fiends, lips pared back like blue-lipped hyena. And I thought: Damn but I love talking shit at the footy.
Barba made a play. He scooped Sam Williams’ sliding grubber up off the dew and saw some space short-side only he could see. And at Belmore or Brisbane or sweet Kogarah-Jubilee on a fine Sunday afternoon, perhaps he’d have hot-footed it down field in his exhilarating way.
But not in Canberra, not that night. The Raiders grabbed him, scragged him as they had all night, and on the slippery deck they rustled Barba into touch.
Cecchin left his whistle in his pocket, and up we went again, the fans of this Green Machine, and we exalted: Cop that! You … Dogs of Sore!
“Tres ordinary play on tackle nought from Benjamin Barba,” I remarked.
“Can’t do that in Canberra on a Saturday night,” Obi agreed.
“Bet he wins the Dally M, though,” I said, and I was right.
Of course, there was, channel your best mock Rabs, con-tro-versy.
Spunky Sandor touched down in the corner, replays appearing to show he did so just inside the line. Everyone looked at the replay. And thought as one: Did he get it down inside? Is there doubt? And if there is doubt – as several replays would appear to insinuate there is – does the attacking team not benefit?
When Russell Smith of England pressed the button for ‘NO TRY’ we turned around to his box and yelled things at him about humanity, etcetera.
But it mattered not. Five minutes into the second-half old Sex-on-a-Stick Sandor leapt in the air and landed with a hat-trick. And it was all Canberra.
But, sweet merciless Raven of Odin, it was so cold. In the movies, when people are dying they sometimes whisper, “So cold. So, so very cold.” As if when you die you suddenly get a rush of fresh air in your veins. Maybe it’s true.
And I wondered further through chattering teeth how long it would take to die there in the inner bowl of Canberra Stadium, and would we have to eat each other like those Uruguayan rugby players whose plane ditched in the Andes.
We looked at the Raiders bench. Tom Leahroyd-Lahrs was on it. “They didn’t stop feeding him, did they?” Obi remarked and there could be no argument. Joe Picker was seated next to him in his Bjorn Borg hair-do and headband, the Ice Man of Sweden. He hadn’t been on and we were 66 minutes in. Men afield were doing the job.
One of them was dear Joshua Dugan who was, as ever, playing footy like a man trying to fight his way out of a sack as thugs beat him with cricket bats. He was having a whale, Duges, tearing about like lime green malaria. Acceleration off the mark, steppy, gangly, snakey, slippery and hard, a heady combination.
When Robinson ran over Barba, who looked like he’d rather be somewhere, anywhere else, the Raiders had thrashed the Dogs 34-6.
And I looked into the stands and thought: No Raiders Army? Has there been a schism? Internal political brouhaha? A rebellion within the ranks? Turns out they disbanded at the end of 2011 after 10 years occupying Bay 72 because of disillusionment with the direction of the club and because some of the boys got married, had kids and stuff.
Some thought it their right to have a say in said direction of the club rather than be, as the club saw them, because that’s what they were, consumers of club product with no input in, you know, direction.
And I thought:
Let me say this to you, oh former soldiers of this man’s Raiders Army: your boys play like this every week, and they could - actually fair dinkum could - up and win the whole freakin’ thing.
Sure, yes, blah–de-blah - it’s a massive ‘if’. But for the past three years there’s been an Unlikely Grand Finalist. Eels, Roosters and Warriors have come from the clouds and ridden the lightning of old mate momentum.
And while the not-McIntrye Finals System won’t help Canberra, as it should not, they could go into the finals having beaten – indeed verily–whupped - Melbourne, Canterbury and Cronulla.
So get aboard this Green Dream Machine.
And then I went somewhere warm.
Postscript: A week later the Raiders were down 22-6 against New Zealand Warriors at half-time at Mt Smart before scoring 36 unanswered points to beat the Warriors 42-22. (And if you think the Raiders are enigmatic, spare a thought for Warriors fans whose team is more erratic than Saddam on the piss.)
A week later, 24,450 fans saw Canberra knock Cronulla out 34-16 before Greg Inglis and Dave Taylor were too good for the Raiders at the Sydney Football Stadium as the Rabbitohs ended the Raiders’ year 38-16.
A fortnight later, Canterbury and Melbourne, the two teams Canberra had beaten by a combined score of 76-16, met in that year’s grand final, the one in which James Graham rubbed his teeth vigorously against Billy Slater’s ear, and Storm won their second official premiership after playing the previous season for no points and having much of their record expunged for one of the game’s greatest rorts.