But enough of Them, and more of Us. For we celebrate, of course, the last game of the great Big Papa, Josh Papali’i, who will sail off into the sunset with the souls of so many brutalised middle forwards pinned to his chest like scalps.

What an ornament. What a Raider. What a ripper.

Should be a ripper.

Papa will of course lead the team as they storm out to the cool, if easily-mocked percussion of the Viking Clap, who cares if we pinched it from Iceland, all art is derivitive, is what they’ll tell you.

They’ll also tell you that Papa will have a massive game for the Green Machine this evening, one fears for the ribs of Payne Haas and Pat Carrigan, Papa is going to turn himself into a fair dinkum human combine harvester.

True story: last game for him? There will be nothing left on GIO Stadium but the dried blood of the man’s cauterised scab tissue, and if he scores a try under the sticks - as one hopes can be setup - the joint will go gangbusters. Worst case he’ll get a last shot at goal.

What a beauty.

Alongside him, often enough, bolting off the bench will be Big Red, Corey Horsburgh, who two weeks ago was personally blamed for ending the club’s season, I honestly think Ricky Stuart sometimes forgets, or just doesn’t care, that he’s in a press conference talking to Everyone rather than holding court and scraping shit off his liver to his homies in the Croatia-Deakin Soccer Club. See also Jaemon Salmon. So much liver.

Simi Sasagi is back - yay - and Seb Kris is out - boo. Sasagi’s a match-winner for us, how good is he going, a genuine breakout season. But feel like Kris has been a beauty for long enough, too, and he couldn’t sneak into the 19 ahead of Savelio Tamale? Yeah … I dunno. In Stick of course we trust, what’s going on in-house they keep pretty tight because they don’t talk to media that much, the stuff they do mid-week has all the rigour of a chat at the hairdressers.

Kris has plenty of sap in him still and is signed until the end of 2027 but the Raiders will let him go if he can get a multi-year deal with someone else, the two new clubs mean this is very much an option. The Chiefs, particularly, effectively have a salary cap unaffected by a 48% tax-rate.

The Chiefs could recruit an Origin-strength team in the next few years, at least until the reality of living in a compound surrounded by razor wire hits home, it seems an un-natural way of life, not being able to leave the Green Zone lest drug-addled locals attack you with machetes. Sell that to darling, see how you go. Be a lot of fellows FIFOing, I’m tipping.

Give it some thought, Hudson Young, for we would offer you a mint and keys to the city which include the actual Mint.

Anyway, such is pro footy and such is the lot of the pro footy fan, for “loyalty” in pro sports is … well it’s not a thing as we, the fan, understand it, the clubs are these players’ employers and they’ll hock you off if there’s a better, younger version of you available. It’d be like working for McDonald’s and staying loyal to the Clown even though the Colonel’s KFC offered you lots more money and a lifestyle living in fear of chop wounds and sharp force trauma.

No such malaise shall befall our Canberra Raiders this evening, the People, for the Broncos have won one game in their last 13 (a 14-12 victory over Penrith Panthers, of all people), are missing Reece Walsh, and will call off the bench 26-year-old 15-gamer, Aublix Tawha, who once played SG Ball for the Raiders out of Yass and was known as the “hardest tackler in Holland”.

Heck of a handle, Aublix, could be the only one in the world.

And so! We win tonight and we win well, the record forever showing that Canberra Raiders 40 (Kaeo Weekes (2), Jed Stuart (2), Matty Nicholson, Xavier Savage, Simi Sasagi tries; Ethan Saunders 5/7, Josh Papali’i goal) defeated Brisbane Broncos 4 (Aublix Tawha try).

Up the Milk.

And just while you’re here, and yes it’s a book about Manly (and Parramatta), but there are just nine days to pledge allegiance to publication of “Here We Go Again”, a book about 80 years of battles between those footy clubs, if you don’t want one for yourself we can think of no more thoughtful gift for a Manly and Parra fan in your life, they’ve had a heck of a time.

We’re 25% of the way to $12k and if we don’t reach that mark it comes to nothing and your card isn’t debited. So. Yes. Ha. Probably come to nowt. But it worked for The Milk, and thought it might get up for a book about two clubs. Spread the love if you’re able. Link is: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mattcleary/here-we-go-again

x

Meanwhile, your friendly neighbourhood Milkman is plugging a book about Manly and Parramatta that you might back out of simple goodwill to all (Milk) men, and/or tip onto Sea Eagles or Eels people, if anyone actually does know such people, or at least admits to it, ho ho. Parra fans need love, too.

The book, “Here We Go Again”, will be like “The Milk”, except about all the games these clubs have played in the last shared 80 years of their history, a couple of which sparked a Tooheys commercial and now 40 years later, this idea for a book.

It’s a living, of sorts. If you can zap it onto our peeps, appreciate it.

Up the Milk.

x

Nicholson! First game back since the semi-final against Sharks in September. He’s only played 11 games since his breakout debut in round two of 2025 when he bagged a brace against Brisbane. Great to see how he goes, even off the bench in jumper 18.

Especially given…

… Bastard yin has gone with otherwise positive yang and the Outs are Big, too. None bigger than Hudson Young (achilles) who will join Owen Pattie (suspension) and Savelio Tamale (dropped) watching from the sideline.

I still like us for the eight. But further than that? No Huddo? Hard to see it.

Should be a good game. If it’s dry in Canberra at 3pm on Saturday, this still-strong and in-form Milk could put 50 on Wests Tigers, as they did ten years ago, as chronicled in the following extract from The Milk, the book, about a flat-out glorious game to be a Raiders fans, last round at Leichhardt Oval in 2016.

Them? They’re here with a winger in a Roosters jumper, another with no profile picture at all, and a five-eighth with one leg in Parramatta and the other in Port Moresby.

Up the Milk. We’ll win by 42.

1. Kaeo Weekes

2. Jed Stuart

3. Simi Sasagi

4. Matt Timoko

5. Xavier Savage

6. Ethan Strange

7. Ethan Sanders
   

8. Corey Horsburgh

9. Tom Starling

10. Joe Tapine

11. Zac Hosking

12. Noah Martin

13. Morgan Smithies

14. Jayden Brailey

15. Ata Mariota

16. Josh Papalii

17. Daine Laurie

18. Mattt Nicholson

19. Seb Kris
    

20. Coby Black

21. Vena Patuki-Case

22. Sione Finau

When Leipana Ruled Leichhardt: Canberra Raiders 52 defeated Wests Tigers 10 at Leichhardt Oval, September 4, 2016.

Joey ‘BJ’ Leilua came to Canberra from Newcastle Knights with a reputation for being “fat and lazy”, according to none other than Joey ‘BJ’ Leilua.

But Ricky Stuart got him running, fit and happy like a jolly, athletic Buddha. And in 2016 Leilua forged such a combination with the inimitable Jordan Rapana that they called them by one name: Leipana.

Leipana – the combination yielded 40 line breaks and 273 tackle breaks. They scored 34 tries. The entire Newcastle Knights amassed just 52 tries, while the Raiders topped the pops for points, tries and goals.

And, in the 17th minute of the final round fixture between Canberra Raiders and Wests Tigers, on a glorious Spring afternoon at Leichhardt Oval, Leipana combined for a try that Leilua plucked from his very crazy backside.

It was the very peak of a flat-out glorious year to be a Raiders fans.

See it:

The home side is trucking it out of their half when Tim Simona – who’d 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 centre which causes him to step and make a poor decision – an offload out the back of his hand to the ground. It’s a dud play, a dud option, by a fellow who would make dud choices in his short, privileged life.

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 backwards towards his own try-line and holding the ball in a big right mitt. Seeing his other half, Rapana, making tracks to the right wing, Leilua flicks the Steeden behind his back, around Addo-Carr and into the arms of Rapana.

The winger takes the Steeden and before he’s even touched down is pointing backwards to his mate 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 Canberra 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. Captain Jarrod Croker was the competition’s leading point-scorer.

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.

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 and won the Raiders second spot on the ladder and a home semi-final. And Leilua’s was the peak play of a peak game of a great, great season.

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 and the Sharks won the comp for the first time in 49 years.

They’d have heard the one about the family which had a pet rabbit they named after their hero, Ron Coote. When Coote left Souths to join the Roosters – in Bunny lore, akin to renouncing Australia to join ISIS-K - they cooked and ate the rabbit.

There was the one about the gypsy woman who cursed the Roosters for taking Coote to Bondi Junction. There’s a thousand more. Souths have so many yarns that Russell Crowe made a book of them.

But Redfern was still an eye-opener for a bus full of bushies.

“I was shocked how parochial it was,” game one Raiders centre Peter McGrath says. “I remember sitting there during reserve grade thinking, My god, is this for real? The Souths supporters, they were so vocal. I was from the country. And they were right on you, telling you what they thought.”

What did they think? Go home, bush hicks?

“It wasn’t like that; it wasn’t anything to do with country bumpkins. It was more, like, Now you’re here. We’re going to show you what the big time is about,” McGrath says.

Twenty-four hours previously two busloads of Canberra Raiders players, coaches and staff made the four-hour trip up the single-lane Hume Highway to Sydney. Into the outskirts of western Sydney and the rural became Liverpool, Warwick Farm, Yagoona, Chullora, Strathfield. They’d get to the big T-junction turn-off at Great Western Highway. Left for Penrith, right for Ashfield and the Marco Polo Motor Inn on Parramatta Road.

Then it was fend for yourselves, boys, according to McGrath.

“None of us liked the trips. It was the old Hume Highway. Single lane. We’d leave Queanbeyan at lunchtime on a couple of buses, all three grades. We’d get to the motel at Ashfield and have to find dinner. None of us had done it before. Lot of blokes hadn’t even been to Sydney.

“Halfway through the year it was decided we’d leave later and have dinner at Mittagong. Most blokes would get Macca’s.” McGrath says, adding that “the trips back were worse.”

“You’d spend four hours in a bus after being flogged by 50 by Parramatta. We played against Wests at Lidcombe one day, they gave us a shellacking. Lidcombe was rock-hard. The players were tough, hard bastards. Played against a young Terry Lamb.

“We had an after-match function in the grandstand. Wests had no dough. It was very basic - party pies, tins of Tooheys. Then you’re back on the bus. Tail between your legs. We didn’t have pub crawls home, I can tell you,” McGrath says.

They did fit in a few beers, however, according to winger Chris O’Grady in The Story of the Green Machine. “The bus trips were funny, on the way back they were a free for all. But once ‘Flex’ [trainer Brian Bourke] got a hold of you on Monday, any alcohol in the system came out fairly quickly,” O’Grady said.

The Raiders didn’t have a gym or a weights room. They’d run circuits of Queanbeyan. They’d run three laps of the Queanbeyan trotting track. Experienced players would lie in the long grass and wait for the leaders to come by. They’d run up and down Bungendore Hill. They would run and run and run, often for 10km, at all hours, in 40-degree heat.

“We did all sorts of crazy things … a lot of [Bourke’s] stuff would be outlawed today. But his contribution was huge,” O’Grady said.

Bourke was old school fit, he was Charles Atlas-fit. And he was raspy-voiced and there were veins in his calves and he was just a hard, fit, tough bloody buzzard. If he didn’t kill you it made you stronger. That pain? Weakness leaving your body. And all that. His methods may not have been professional. But the Raiders didn’t lose because they weren’t fit.

Bill Walker says he became a better person because of it. He wasn’t always happy about it at the time, however.

“We were training one day in 43-degree heat,” Walker recalls. “And we’re running up and down the bloody park and I’m coming last all the time. And every time you come last you had to run down to the fence again.

“Donny Furner’s having a crack at me, ‘Walker’s last again’. I got sick of it. I said, ‘Where’s my car keys, Fatty?’ He said, ‘What are you talking about?’ I said, ‘Where’s my car keys, I’m going.’ He said, ‘What, you going to quit like a big girl’s blouse, are you?’ I said, ‘Yeah I am, where’s my keys?’ and I stormed off.

“Later that afternoon I went to his house and apologised. He said, ‘We all know what it’s like training in 43-degree heat down here.’ And we patched things up.

“We still didn’t see the ball at training. Everything was running – from 100m sprints to 10km road runs.”

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The players were on $500-a-win plus top-up money if they played seven games, 14 games, and so on. There was also a sign-on fee depending on the player’s ‘name’ and how good he was. But at a time when even the game’s top internationals were paid about $30,000 a year – and the average win bonus was $200 - all players had jobs and did their best.

“We pre-dated professionalism,” McGrath says. “I don’t know if we even had a sponsor.”

(They did not – until the surname of a family of builders called Woodger appeared front of shirt in 1983.)

McGrath says he never saw or heard of anyone doing ‘cash’ deals.

“That’s how Les McIntyre was. He was a great man. It’s a cliché but his word was his bond. The contract I signed was the one for the NSWRFL, a standard document. Most of the time I played league I didn’t have a contract,” McGrath says.

And so, to Redfern, where the firsts watched the third grade match and the first half of the reserve grade one before heading off to suit up in Souths’ brick sheds. With steel studs clacking on the concrete floor, liniment smell strong, coach Furner spoke and club captain David Grant spoke, and each individual did their best in the pregnant moments pre-match. It wasn’t like the bit in Gladiator when old mate wees himself. But rugby league, those days, it was like preparing for an actual fight. And out into the maelstrom those baby Raiders went.

Early in the match Souths lock Robert Simpkins ran the ball at McGrath in the centres. McGrath did what he’d always done: aim a shoulder at a hip, drive with legs, wrap arms. And Simpkins “just kept going”, according to McGrath.

“I tackled him and he just didn’t stop. And I was thinking, This is not how it works. I hit you, you go down. Not: you keep going! It was like, This is it. I’m here.

“It was fabulous,” McGrath exclaims.

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It got better. Rabbitohs winger Mark Ross – who five years later would replace Steve Mavin when George Piggins hooked the winger off the SCG before half-time in a semi-final against Canberra – dropped a pass. The ball was seized upon by Lloyd Martin who found Jay Hoffman who found a good man in the circumstance: Gerry de la Cruz.

The halfback, born in Innisfail, raised in Darwin, described as “the first half-Filipino, half-Sri Lankan to play top level rugby league”, stepped through a clutch of South Sydney defenders in a run described as “bewildering” twice in the same piece by The Canberra Times.

And after 24 minutes the visitors had a shock 7-5 lead.

That was as good as it got, however.

In the second half the Raiders dropped the ball several times while referee Barry Goldsworthy found 11 penalties against them and just two in their favour. Souths’ rake Ken Stewart won the scrums – an important thing in times when scrums were dockyard brawls – 13-7 over Hoffman. And on top of all the possession and territory and exploitation by cunning halfback Graham Murray, Ross scored a hat-trick, Simpkins scored a double while Ziggy Niszczot and Peter Smith scored tries, too.

And after the Redfern Oval scoreboard attendant racked up 37 points for Souths and 7 for Canberra, back on the bus those bush babies went.

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Don Furner, though, stayed an extra night in Sydney to see the Raiders’ next opponents, Western Suburbs Magpies, play Manly Warringah Sea Eagles at Lidcombe Oval, a game Manly won 33-12 in a typical bash-fest.

The following Saturday was Canberra’s first home game and Wests piled on seven tries in the 33-4 loss at Seiffert Oval. Lamb scored a double and spent 10 minutes in the sin bin for “a tackling infringement.”

“Raiders learn the big Sydney lesson,” went The Canberra Times headline with journalist Kevin Robertson declaring that “Wests slammed home the strength of Sydney rugby league.” Both statements effectively channelled the insecurity of locals from Queanbeyan, Canberra and the greater Monaro – a mob you could categorise as ‘suburban bushies’ - felt in relation to the big smoke up the road.

Sydney was where Test cricket was. The Opera House was in Sydney and all those skyscrapers. Paul Keating once quipped that “anywhere else you’re just camping out.” Like Australia to America, New Zealand to Australia, Origin-infused Queensland to the larger state of New South Wales, Canberra felt like the lesser cousin; patronised - or worse, ignored. And being heard by – and beating - the smug bastards up the road was very much in the public interest.

That interest was piqued soon enough.

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And breathe.

Simi Sasagi. He’s back, bumping Seb Kris out of the centres, it’ll be good to see him bopping about close to the line. I’d have moved Kris to the wing and given Savelio Tamale time in reserves getting better at catching, but the coach picks and sticks, which is appreciated by players, for Tamale’s done other Good Things.

Anyway, along with Daine Laurie’s one-match suspension for some pre-season nose-beer nonsense, Sasaagi’s return is about the extent of the sports news, sports fans, ahead of this fixture, 16 vs 17, you can’t call it #SpoonBowl because St George Illawarra Dragons remain the next-best guarantee of two points to the bye.

Thus: danger game.

Thus: let’s not tempt fate any further, and instead here’s an extract from the good book of Milk, The Milk, which for the price of whatever costs a dollar these days - half a Mars Bar, say, or a python - you might…

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… and we’ll post you an author-signed signed copy of the book which Laurie Daley provided the Foreword for. And thus you might read of the Raiders first 40 years, which includes the following review of 2021, one of the Raiders’ weirdly dud seasons, for manifold reasons, as D.Laurie’s suspension shows, these people are far from professional sports-bots.

Up the Milk.

*

“Annus horribilis,” said Her Majesty The Queen, describing the year Lady Di died, and who was to argue? She’d been around the block, The Queen. She also said: “Grief is the price we pay for love.” And still nobody argued, not with the Queen, for she was possessed of great majesty.

While the Raiders’ 2021 NRL season wasn’t ‘tragic’ and fans weren’t grief-stricken and of course nobody died … well, as Matthew Johns would say: what a bludger.

We began in March, as we always do, though as we particularly do in The Stuart Era, full of hope. Not cautious hope. Not audacious hope. Genuine, justified, we-belong among-the-big-dogs-and-experts-agree hope.

Grand finalists in 2019. All-but into the decider in 2020. Johnny Bateman was gone but otherwise all appeared slick aboard the Good Ship Stick.

Within a month it was all we could do to stay afloat.

There was a rumble from the jungle: halfback George Williams - pregnant partner, long way from home - wanted a release from his contract at the end of season ‘21.

The request went back and forth. The club was empathetic but firm. Have six weeks at Christmas. See you when we see you. But, mate, we paid Wigan $200k to get you here…

Williams’ manager asked again, and then again. The club, like the computer, said no.

The next day, after the third approach was rebuffed, Williams called a welfare officer, said he wouldn’t be at training. That person advised that he call Ricky Stuart. The pair had a chat and Williams advised Stuart that he wasn’t right to play that weekend, either.

Stuart went to Don Furner. And the pair agreed that Williams could have what he wanted. Release granted, George! Effective immediately!

Williams baulked. That’s not what I meant…

Yet it was done. There followed much back-and-forth between Williams and News Ltd journos Paul Kent and James Hooper. There was something about Williams’ management shopping him to other clubs because he’s a Pom and the beach.

And back to Blighty our Georgie boy went.

“I'm just sad that relationship is pretty sour, I've not spoken to [Stuart] since the release,” Williams wrote in a column for the BBC.

“He was brilliant and I'll never forget that, but when things went bad he turned his back on me.”

And in a squad chock-full of ex-pat Poms, it didn’t sit well.

Josh Hodgson’s form slipped. Tom Starling was starting in the No.9. Hodgson stood down as co-captain.

Stuart offered Hodgson, as he would, critique and counsel. Told some hard truths. Listen to Stuart and the advice was accepted in the spirit it was given. According to the coach, the pair hugged it out afterwards.

Hodgson’s beef was the content of said counsel appeared to then come from the mouth of Stuart’s mate Kent, the forthright, strongly-opinionated, love-him-or-hate him-you-can’t-ignore-him, ever-talking-head on ubiquitous footy show NRL 360.

Kent didn’t attribute the words to Stuart - you don’t talk out of school. But Hodgson wasn’t happy that what he considered in-house critique of his play seemed to have ended up on the telly.

As Bateman said from afar: “I don’t understand how you’re told to keep things internally but the next minute you’ve got [journalists] chatting about it within 24 hours of what’s been said at the club.

“You ask yourself, ‘Who is leaking that stuff out? Who is mates with who?’ You question it, don’t you?”

While all this malarkey was carrying on, Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad and the other captain, point-scoring machine Jarrod Croker, were rubbed out; Josh Papalii was worn out, Joe Tapine’s wife was blurting away on Instagram about something, and Curtis Scott was being a dickhead in a pub.

It was later revealed Scott had had a fight with Bateman in 2020 and injured his hand. And for a club that’s punted some of the NRL’s best and biggest pissed-up pelicans, off our Curtis went with the club’s best wishes.

The Raiders had drawn another line in the sand.

They continued to lose, however.

Tough game, and no argument. But they’re 12th for a reason, as we are 14th for a reason – because injury. This competition, if you don’t have your best, or near your best XIX to call on each week in continuity, you’ll struggle. The Storm have lost eight games, we’ve lost nine.

Their spine is probably the best in the competition. Ours is a capable of plenty. Like to see Owen Pattie with more minutes today, even starting. But in Stick, of course, we trust.

And you can trust that the coach will have been into his team all week to have a crack, stick up the doubters, and leave it all out there. Expect monster games from the dear leadership group, call it Joe Tapine, Corey Horsburgh, Hudson Young and Seb Kris, while Ethan Strange and Kaeo Weekes will be throwing it all out there, and have no fears of the purple haze nor the ground.

They’ve lacked confidence last few starts. Ethan Sanders reminds us of his youth with each week’s exhibition of skill and game-management.

This week, no pressure, they’re already at zero, we will upset many multis with a 20-12 victory, as we did in 2011, as chronicled in a topical extract of a stanza following from The Milk the actual hard-copy book.

And were you to…

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… to this here bit of kit, we’d post you an author-signed copy, and you could read it, and then give it to your mum and/or dad for Mothers and/or Fathers Day.

Up the Milk.

*

IN THE MIDDLE of May in 2011, in the season after they played for no points, Melbourne Storm hosted Canberra Raiders at the aptly - and tres functionally-named - Melbourne Rectangular Stadium.

And though they’d had to give up Brett White, Brett Finch, Aiden Tolman and Greg Inglis because some pelican in accounts kept two sets of books and a disaffected employee dobbed, Melbourne Storm, in their very Melbourne Storm way, remained the testing material of the National Rugby League.

Billy Slater was fullback, Cooper Cronk halfback, and Cameron Smith captain, hooker and match official.

There was Gareth Widdop, Jesse Bromwich, Adam Blair, Kevin Proctor, Bryan Norrie, Ryan Hinchcliffe and a goon squad of madmen like Sika Manu who roared off the bench like a hammerhead shark. They were hard people.

By round 10 they had won seven and lost two to sit second on the ladder. So not an atypical season for the southern monster and purple machine.

Canberra Raiders, meanwhile, had lapped Cronulla 40-12 in round one, then – for reasons known only to them - lost the next eight straight to equal the club record for consecutive losses, set across 1985/86. Then they went to Melbourne where they hadn’t won in 11 years.

And on a mild Saturday night in dear old Melboring, Canberra towelled up Melbourne Storm 20-12. The Raiders! They were bottom of the ladder! They were shit-house! And they would go on to be shit-house for the rest of the season. They lost 10 of their next 14 games including the last six straight to cap – give us your best Ray Warren - a veritable bludger of a season.

There were reasons, even excuses. Dane Tilse was injured. Joe Picker was injured. Josh Miller was injured. Josh Dugan was injured. Matt Orford was injured. Mighty Norwegian Viking Tom Learoyd-Lahrs - another whose name rolls gloriously across the larynx of Rabs Warren - was injured.

Terry Campese’s first game of the season after rupturing his anterior cruciate ligament in the 2010 finals was the round 13 fixture at Bruce Stadium versus North Queensland Cowboys. He came off the bench, played eight minutes, tore his groin and didn’t play again for nine months.

So, there was all that. And yes, Rabs, it was a deadset bludger.

And yet hopes, as they often are, had been high. John McIntyre called the club’s recruitment drive “the best in a decade”. Blake Ferguson came from Cronulla Sharks. White came from Melbourne Storm.

Orford came from Bradford Bulls and said of his new club: “They’ve got a big forward pack, they’ve got speed and talent - it’s just one of those things you can see [in a team], [signing] was just a no-brainer. They’re a team on the rise … the opportunity sort of lit my eyes up.”

It would have. Few (if any) NRL clubs would’ve offered 32-year-old Orford a three-year deal. The Raiders, though, had to.

In the decade since Laurie Daley retired, the last of the greats from the Meninga Dynasty, Canberra had struggled to attract top players. Well, they attracted them. But after a look around they’d leave quick smart. It became a Thing. Players talked. When David Shillington told team-mates he was leaving Clovelly for Belconnen, he was mocked in that way men do, when it’s like a half-joke.

Raiders chief executive Don Furner told The Canberra Times that the signing of Ferguson, White and Orford “dispelled the myth” that big name players didn’t want to come to the capital.

“Definitely the tide has turned. We’ve been able to get sponsors on board … and those third-party deals help out. For us to be competitive, that’s what we’ve needed. Winning changes things and when blokes enjoy it down here, it spreads,” Furner said.

Canberra would finish equal-last. They weren’t whacked with their second wooden spoon because Gold Coast Titans are the greatest meh team of the competition and have been since Gold Coast Tweed Giants lobbed in 1988. You’d sooner follow Trump to jail.

The Gold Coast, and someone should do a study, is the great vortex of the National Rugby League. It’s holiday land. Fun land. Players, consciously and sub-consciously, they’ll tell you themselves off the record of course, but they switch off. Even as their bodies are pounded by Trevor Gillmeister on the training track, their head is on holiday.

Orford would play six games and lose each one. And because he was halfback everyone blamed him. Not everyone blamed him. But enough did – including some peanut who keyed the sponsored Audi Orford got about in following a 37-point loss at home to Wests Tigers.

Note: Orford is not shit house and never was. Just had a bad few games. It happens. But still…

So embattled was Orford that an anonymous Raiders official (one of the Furner brothers, my tip, into bat for his man) told The Canberra Times: “You can’t just focus on the halves.”

“There is a lot more to a team game than that. [Orford] is a champion player and he’ll come through it,” said the official. But Orford never did. He was 33. He’d debuted for Northern Eagles 11 years previously. It was pension time. It was over. Nobody’s fault, just how it was.

In round nine, against Manly Sea Eagles at Orford’s old stomping ground at Brookvale Oval, a game in which 20-year-old Nathan Massey debuted at fullback for the Raiders and his opposite number Brett Stewart ran in tries number 99, 100, and 101 for Manly, Orford hobbled off in the 20-nil loss. And he never played again.

And from there, outside the Miracle at Melbourne Rectangular, the season continued inexorably to a place lower than meh. Sub-meh, say. Subterranean meh. The worst kind of meh. I don’t know, it was just shit, okay?

It would get worse, if that was possible.

By season’s end a photograph of Joel Monaghan playing silly buggers with a mate’s Alsatian – by simulating oral sex with the hound – was zapping around the phones of Kangaroo Tourists. It was a Lay Down Sally misere the picture would become public and it did, begetting the unfortunate headline in Fairfax newspapers: “NRL star confirms sex act with dog”.

And so Monaghan – a long-striding crack centre-three-quarter who would play 121 games for Canberra Raiders, twice for NSW and five times for Australia – was packed off to the (sorry-still-sorry) dog house in Warrington where amused spectators sang “Who let the dogs out, woof-woof-woof” on high rotation. And fathers told their sons the fable of the man who, despite leading a model life, knew ‘one goat’…

Yet there were, as ever, green shoots, particularly the chunky Samoan boy from Logan. That kid was a belter. They compared him to Tonie Carroll and Ruben Wiki. Except where Carroll had the berserker’s fire in his eyes and relished the hits and the toughness of it, and Wiki played with the Terminator’s eyes, the Samoan kid just sort of belted people. It was just how he played, how he tackled. And rather than any aggro or big dick standover stuff, the Logan kid was as likely to check if the folded ball-carrier was okay.

And that kid debuted off the bench in that round 10 win over Melbourne Storm.

And he ended up going alright, Josh Papalii.

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Little surprise they sit tied-third on the ladder and are but one of the contenders our Canberra Raiders must claw over in coming weeks if we are to make a statement that says the $7 I got for them making the top-eight is massive overs.

Regardless! Hold the ball, receive a fair suck of the souvlaki from Gerard Sutton and the bunkermen, and this game could come down to a Golden Point field goal.

Here’s hoping the boy Colonel Ethan Sanders knocks one over as he did against Manly in March, and the KFC at Belconnen Mall follows the lead of the one hereabouts at Manly Vale and puts his head on the shop instead of the actual Colonel.

Don’t go changin’, rugba league.

Old mate might be a little premature, however.

Who’ll win? Us, of course. At home, in form. I like our big units in the middle more than their big units, and the game is won up front, just so long as the ones at the back don’t stuff things up too often and badly.

An old Rah-Rah mate of The Milk’s once said it’s the forwards who decide who wins and the backs by how much.

Yet in modern day national rugby league, field position and territory is all, and you don’t want to give your opponents free pots at you.

Thus, Daly Cherry-Evans and Sam Walker will bomb the shit out of Xavier Savage and Savelio Tamale. But if those worthies can hold their nerve, and win big metres back down field, it will go a long way to giving Ethan Strange, Kaeo Weekes and Hudson Young time and space in the Roosters D-zone to do their thing.

And when those guys are bopping about, funky and good things happen. That’s the footy that beats the Chooks. Because that footy beats everybody.

In team news, Joe Roddy is out, Raiders media telling us that his injured hand needs an extra week to recover, despite being named in the XIX on Tuesday.

Roddy’s place on the end of the six-man bench will be taken by potential debutant Vena Patuki-Case, the 21-year-old from Cambridge Park in the Penrith and District Junior Rugby League.

He’ll wear jumper No.21 and looks cherry ripe. As Eddie Murphy once said of Mr T: it don’t look like he can’t fight.

Despite the five-day turnaround, which according to Ricky Stuart just means there’s less coaching and more conditioning, the coach has declared his team is full of confidence following the demolition of Cowboys on Sunday, in which the team “didn’t have a bad player”.

“Even some games we’ve lost this year, we haven’t been far away. I’ve got to try and be balanced when reviewing games and performances. Last week was a really, really strong performance. Other games we’ve had things not go our way,” Stuart told Raiders media.

“Last week, we had bounces go our way. We didn’t points off them but you get another set of six. It’s the way things are today.

“You need a lot of things to help you.”

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A forecast temperature of six degrees at kick-off, dropping to three degrees by close, should help the Raiders overcome the Bondi beachboys. However many rep players they have, it can be confusing when you can’t see your team-mates for halos of steaming breath-fog.

Up the Milk!

*

Also! Follows is an extract from The Milk, the book, about one of our most favourite players, Jordan Rapana, the all-action back-three man who scored the third-most tries in club history (106) behind Jason Croker (136) and Jarrod Croker (120).

And were you to make the very wise choice and become a paying subscriber to this here journal, we would post you a signed copy of the book for the price of a flat-white per month. True fact. Fathers Day sorted. Up the Milk.

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FOR THE MOST PART, the people of Merthyr Tydfil in the valleys of south Wales didn’t care what was in Jordan Rapana’s books. As clean-livin’ and friendly as he and his pal appeared, decked out in crisp white shirts and black ties, with little name tags that described the 19-year-olds as “Elders”, there was little stomach for the pair’s talk of prophets and God, and whatever else they were hockin’. Most people didn’t want to know.

But as the Welsh folk listened to the boy speak, and clocked the fitness of him, his Pacific Islander complexion, his smiling eyes, they would ask if he was, per chance, from New Zealand.

Seems he was! And there would follow talk of rugby and Jonah Lomu and Wales’ famous win over the All Blacks in 1935. And thus folk of disparate age and culture would bond over pigskin. And while Rapana made very few conversions to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, he converted plenty to the belief that he was, like most Kiwi lads, a very nice young man indeed.

Rapana, meanwhile, was learning a valuable lesson in sales and in life: each knock-back can beget opportunity. And from each setback one can learn something, and grow, achieve and become, as if by chrysalis, something else.

In 2013 Rapana was a barman, a hairdresser and a fullback with Canberra Royals RUFC, nominally a feeder club for ACT Brumbies. And then Blake Ferguson and Josh Dugan went on a roof to knock back stubbies of alco-pop and flip the bird to their coach, David Furner. And out the door they went.

And so Rapana summoned the sales philosophy of the oft-brushed Mormon – do your best, smile and think: What’s the worst can happen? I’m already at “No”.

Rapana didn’t have an agent in’2013. He’d had one but old mate, probably justifiably, was focused on money-makers. Rapana was a code-hopping, jack-of-all-trades-and master-of-none.

Rapana debuted as an 18-year-old for Gold Coast Titans. Had played rugby at Western Force. And was known as an athlete and a footballer. But he didn’t have a “name”. They respected his work ethic and personality. But he was often injured and thus a hard-sell. Perception was reality. He wasn’t a priority.

So, he made himself one. He asked Furner for a job.

“I approached him and told him who I was,” Rapana told The Milk. “He said he’d known me from ‘08 [at Gold Coast Titans]. I said, ‘I just want an opportunity. I’m not here for money. I see you guys are low on outside backs. I want to come back to league.’

“The very next day he had a contract written up for me.”

The Raiders, meanwhile, thought they had a bargain. Good carry, good feet, good person, good family. And he clearly wasn’t short on confidence.

Said Furner: “There’s not many times you’ll get a kid approaching you, looking for a game. Not many kids would do it. It shows his personality. He’s obviously confident in his ability. And he should be.

“But it wasn’t about ‘selling’ himself, it was just a chat. We’d actually had a bit of a heads-up about him from Dave Hamilton our recruitment guy. I knew he was in the local system, playing rugby. We had nothing to lose.”

They plonked him into fullback with Mounties. He killed ‘em. He added kilos to that skinny winger’s frame and conditioned his body to the brutality of the National Rugby League. Football manager John Bonasera remembers he and Ricky Stuart and Furner watched him play a game against Souths Logan. He killed ‘em there, too.

Next week he was in first grade where he ran 157 metres out of fullback in Darwin in a tight loss to Parramatta Eels. He outplayed the NFL-bound Jarryd Hayne.

In 2015, Rapana played 19 games and the Raiders scored the third-most points in the comp.

In 2016 - that fabulous all-running Raiders year – Rapana played 27 games and scored 23 tries.

And he created a two-headed monster – Leipana.

Lot to like about him, and you fancy Savelio Tamale will find a little space outside him, too.

In extended bench news, a topic that never really raised a heartbeat outside Timmy Gore’s funny bit of kit on his podcast, Joe Roddy finds his way back onto it after recovering from a hand injury, with the impressive Jordan Uta sliding back into Cup. We’ll see him again.

Otherwise, we head into Friday night unchanged from the outfit that so pleasingly beat up on North Queensland Cowboys on Sunday.

Five-day turnaround is not ideal - particularly given Hudson Young and Ethan Strange will be playing their third game in nine days.

Regardless, as a wise man once said, it is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.

I like us.

Up the Milk:

1 Kaeo Weekes

2 Savelio Tamale

3 Daine Laurie

4 Matthew Timoko

5 Xavier Savage

6 Ethan Strange

7 Ethan Sanders

8 Corey Horsburgh

9 Tom Starling

10 Joseph Tapine (C)

11 Hudson Young

12 Zac Hosking

13 Jayden Brailey

Interchange

14 Owen Pattie

15 Ata Mariota

16 Morgan Smithies

17 Jed Stuart

18 Chevy Stewart

19 Joe Roddy

Reserves

20 Coby Black

21 Vena Patuki-Case

22 Ethan Alaia

Injury’s already done for the hooker who’s been playing lock, Jayden Brailey, his place taken by the utility back who’s been playing five-eighth, Daine Laurie. Not exactly Jason Croker shuffling in to replace Brad Clyde. But we do, as ever, what we can with what we have.

Let us pray that Laurie and Savelio Tamale, and a few of their mates, do not mistake their hands for feet as they did in the dud loss to Dolphins at home, you’d glean more enjoyment watching Donald Trump pash.

Otherwise (sorry), the team for Sunday’s clash with Cows - coming scant days after the bone-jarring monster mash of Origin in Sydney Wednesday night - contains few surprises. Let us further pray for no surprises.

It would not surprise if No.16 Morgan Smithies begins the game in the middle of the park and Laurie comes on after the big fellow has tenderised the opposition forwards, people known as “pigs” in the way of these things, it is meant with respect.

Let us further pray that the mad bastards hang onto the ball a tad better than they did against Dolphins on Thursday, that was - and I use this word only sparingly - bad.

It was bad.

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And now, at roughly the halfway stage of this 2027 Telstra Premiership, with Roosters coming in hot and the Raiders receiving them on a five-day turnaround, we need to win this fixture Sunday, rather a lot.

Up the Milk:

1 Kaeo Weekes

2 Savelio Tamale

3 Sebastian Kris

4 Matthew Timoko

5 Xavier Savage

6 Ethan Strange

7 Ethan Sanders

8 Corey Horsburgh

9 Tom Starling

10 Joseph Tapine (C)

11 Hudson Young

12 Zac Hosking

13 Daine Laurie

Interchange

14 Owen Pattie

15 Ata Mariota

16 Morgan Smithies

17 Jed Stuart

18 Chevy Stewart

19 Jordan Uta

Reserves

20 Coby Black

21 Coby Black

22 Ethan Alaia

The Cows? Here.

The run starts now.

Fresh off a bye, imbued with muscle memory from a fierce and competitive hit-out against testing material in Penrith Panthers, and not savagely ravaged by the Origin god, our Raiders, with sufficient possession, territory and six-again-suck-of-the-sav from chief adjudicator Todd Smith and his bunker buds, should emerge victorious in this round 12 fixture, we’ll tip by 10.

Yes, nine thousand times yes, it would be better to have Hudson Young and Ethan Strange playing than not playing. We can all agree on that. But it’s not like their direct replacements, Zac Hosking and Daine Laurie, have been plucked from Parramatta’s SG Ball squad where Jordan Uta was playing in 2024.

Uta? You beauta. But my, a baby boy. He played U/19s for NSW - last year. He graduated from Hills Sports High School’s Class of 2023. When Dolphins prop Felise Kaufusi debuted for Melbourne Storm against the Dragons in round one of 2015, Uta was eight. And it will be quite good fun to see how that maggoty old man of the sea welcomes the baby-boy to first grade.

Yet youth has been no impediment to many of these our Canberra Raiders.

Ethan Sanders looks more assured with each hit-out. Kaeo Weekes is fully scorched earth and surely an Origin candidate given the rules and Tola Koula. Savelio Tamale is busting tackles and leaping in the air, and Owen Pattie is cherry-ripe for top grade man-action.

In further Team List Tuesday on Thursday news, Xavier Savage is back with Jed Stuart wearing No.17. Simi Sasagi’s still broken so Ata Mariota starts in the second-row. And out on the extended extremities, Chevy Stewart (18), Jake Clydsdale (19) and Coby Black (20) will hope for a run with various degrees of optimism.

And on a clear and relatively still and chill evening in the Capital, the Raiders should be too good for the respected Phins of the North, I like us to prevail 32-22 with a try on debut to Uta, wouldn’t that be good.

The Phins? They go alright. Indeed Andrew Johns reckons they have the best backline in the competition. Just not tonight, more’s the pity for them.

But still, they’re tasty: hot kid halfback (Isaiya Katoa), big-stepping wingman (Jamayne Isaako) and skilful schemer (Jeremy Marshall-King). They are well-coached, have won three on the trot, and lie eighth on an NRL ladder which is steadily revealing pretenders and contenders.

Yet they are denuded and busted, tonight, the Phins, a heady combination. To said greedy beast of Origin they lose Thomas Flegler, Max Plath, Selwyn Cobbo and the try-scoring smiler, Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow. These are big Outs when you’re riding momentum on the cusp of contention.

Further eroding this game’s value as a television ratings proposition for neutral viewers is injury to the excellent and under-rated six Kodi Nikorima (hamstring) and, though at time of writing he’s still named on the NRL’s website, The Daily Telegraph reports that Herbie Farnworth (hamstring) will watch this fixture from a seat in the stand at dear old GIO Stadium.

Long way to go to watch a loss in the cold, but Herbie’s a Pom from Blacko in Lancashire, and they breed ‘em tough there in Blacko, a village and civil parish in the Pendle district with population 672 and which is loomed over by Blacko Tower built on a hill by a grocer in 1888.

As a further aside, why the ACT Government wouldn’t see a tourism boon in a new stadium’s ability to host high-profile sports events and rock concerts, and welcome the wallets of people who’d visit to watch these events, is anyone’s guess, the governors of other states are hot for the dollars of visiting fan-types, and surely you’d want to complement the flower show and muscle car dick-fest with Shania Twain, World Cup footy fixtures and the reborn Canberra Arrows A-League club.

Could be just me.

Don’t think it is.

Up the Milk.

I remember: Ricky Stuart on The Footy Show eyeballing Ray Hadley. And not just a little stare, but really glaring at him, hard. Hadley was in the midst of critique of Stuart’s play, how he’d “kick out” when tackled.

Garry Jack used to do it. Mick Hancock was an all-bucking, thrashing machine, rutting the earth. But our Ray – cynics would suggest because Stuart was with Super League-aligned Canberra Raiders and they were the enemy of Hadley’s employer Channel 9 – took it upon himself to have a crack.

Fair play, it was a ballsy question with Stuart sitting right there, even if Hadley couldn’t hold Stuart’s eye given Stuart does a very intense little stare.

“I don’t like the bloke,” Stuart said later. And people thought: yeah, no shit.

I remember: Mal Meninga asking, “What’s rugby league ever done for me?”

Australian Rugby League chairman Ken Arthurson picked the low-hanging fruit and said Meninga was given the chance to captain Australia and that the game had organised a testimonial that raised $350,000 for Meninga.

Meninga's words were ill-chosen and not what he meant, which was that players could do better. But his statement was leapt upon and twisted and used as a weapon. For it was a nasty, manky period and words were weapons.

The establishment ARL made clubs sign loyalty agreements in 1995. By the end of 1996, News Ltd had them expunged on appeal at the high court. Restraint of trade and other legalities. Super League would be a goer. There would be two competitions.

Raiders players were at Queanbeyan Leagues Club for their presentation night when the success of the appeal was announced on the big screen.

“We were sitting there and we really didn’t know what to do,” Laurie Daley told Steve Mascord in the essential Two Tribes: The Untold Story of Rugby League’s Divided Year and the Birth of the NRL. “We didn’t know whether to cheer … we were stunned.”

Some players, Mascord reports, celebrated the ‘win’ by throwing brown-eyes1 at the big screen in jubilation or defiance, or both. Some didn’t know what was going on, who they were brown-eyeing or why. It was funny to brown-eye the big screen, though.

And so, the Raiders players were signed individually, effectively contractors to News Ltd. Monumental sign-on fees. Lotto numbers. Daley, Stuart and Brad Clyde were Super League’s three highest-paid players, signing for $600,000 a year for five years with $100,000 up front.

As Daley says in the foreword for The Milk, in 1989 he was on $6,000 a year - while playing State of Origin.

Steve Walters was asked what he did with his $100k cheque. “I went straight to the bank and express cleared it,” he said, perhaps not trusting that News Ltd was good for it.

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They go alright, however, Penrith, as their competition leading 8-and-one season would indicate, not to mention six years of excellence, five grand finals, four premierships; a dynasty even the salary cap cannot dent. Their system is a killer. Whoever’s up next seems to come cherry ripe.

The Panthers possess a pair of genuine piss-bolters in Casey McLean and the NRL’s leading try-scorer, Thomas Jenkins (16). Brian To’o is harder to tackle than generational poverty. Paul Alamoti’s so good in the centres that Izack Tago’s on the bench.

Nathan Cleary is a weird-arsed obsessive with more kicks than Ronaldinho, Isaah Yeo is equal parts brute lock forward and ball-playing schemer, and Dylan Edwards travels more metres than the Indian Pacific.

And all of that is complemented by a pack full of belters led by chunky man-fridge Moses Leota and backrower Liam Martin who is more Bobcat than man. Clearly these people are the testing material.

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But hear this, sports fans: Martin isn’t playing today and nor is robust hooker, Mitch Kenny. And these, our Canberra Raiders, are not without robust competitive types, either.

Exhibit A: Hudson Young. Yes, he’s back, baby, my man: all-action, rough-n-tumble man from Maitland, you’ll get 80 minutes of nark and grunt and hard-running man-action, he’s more competitive than shares in AI. When Huddo’s humming and power-fisting the Steeden into stadium turf, rugby league is a happy place.

Sure, he is but one man. But Simi Sasagi is another all-action man whose robust work on the edges has yielded six linebreaks, four tries, nine offloads and 448 post-contact metres. He even has two intercepts. Go, him.

Another man is Joe Tapine, who will relish the contest of ideas in the middle of GIO Stadium today, he has 16 offloads in nine games, and clearly Tom Starling, Kaeo Weekes and Ethan Strange need to hunt about after him and his great long free arms of freedom.

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A man on the improve is the fiery phoenix, Savelio Tamale, whose non-solicited advice to management was that they should drop none other than Savelio Tamale, so lacking was he in confidence.

But his damaging running of late has instilled Tamale with momentum and muscle memory from last year when, before injury, he was second only to Herbie Farnworth for tackle breaks and post-contact metres.

Sure, weird cousin Nathan will be raining bombs from space upon him today. But Tamale only needs one fine catch and a 40-metre bust and local fandom will pump his 21-year-old tyres like oxygen.

Ethan Sanders? Ethan Sanders! The boy Colonel had a blinder last week, by far his best game in green in his baby-career to date. Playing behind a dominant forward pack and against fairly effete opposition in Gold Coast Titans, didn’t hurt. But still - confidence and momentum are genuine Things, and it will be illustrative to see how the 22-year-old fares against the standout best seven in the competition, a man whose poster may have adorned the kid’s bedroom wall if kids still do posters on their walls, my teen boys don’t, I was last their age in 1984.

Regardless, the game, for mine, will be decided by three things:

• The halves’ kicking and their team-mates’ chasing;

• The vigour, brutality and staunch, none-shall-pass desire of defence;

• How many six-agains and penalties the referee (*checks website*, beauty - Ashley Klein) deigns that the rough-house Raiders should concede and thus allow the best team in the competition to go bombs away. Here’s hoping our Ash plays a minor supporting character in today’s theatre rather than a starring role.

I like us still. It’ll take a near-perfect game to beat the bash-merchants from the Riff. Their system is so good a team of their salary cap cast-offs could win the competition.

But, as this National Rugby League has shown, with last year’s grand finalists going like busteds, with a top-eight that sports Knights, Cowboys, Rabbitohs, Warriors and even Wests Tigers, anyone (except the Dragons) can beat anyone.

We beat Penrith today and the score will be 23-16.

Up the Milk.

Local media, being local media, thought, Srew you Hans Brix. Here’s a local boy making his debut at home for the local club. It is a story in our public’s interest. We shall thus pursue it.

Prime Television’s Phil Lynch was first on the scene at the site where Gaffey was working as a builder’s labourer. Through the chain link fence he noticed the chunky 19-year-old with a group of work-mates. Doing the right thing, Lynch headed for the foreman’s office to get the okay to go onto the worksite and talk to the boy.

“Phil Lynch from Prime Television,” Lynch introduced himself. “I’d like to do an interview with Nigel Gaffey who’s making his debut for the Raiders this weekend. Mind if I have a word?”

“Sorry, mate,” replied the foreman. “He’s not here.”

“Yes, he is, I just saw him,” Lynch said.

“No, mate. He’s not here,” the foreman repeated.

Lynch pointed out the open door and said: “He’s out there now. I can see him.”

“Mate,” said the foreman. “He. Is. Not. Here.”

Lynch got the message, left the donger. When he looked across to where Gaffey had been, all he could see was a wall of those work-mates, facing outwards, arms akimbo; a picket line of union heavies. Obscured behind the protective Wall of Men: N.Gaffey, who thought it all a great laugh.

As Lynch told The Milk: “Sheens had anticipated that media might ignore his demand and had worded up Gaffey’s workmates on the building site to ‘protect’ him from the press.

“He was very, very protective of his players.”

It was a similar tale for 20-year-old Woden Valley Rams fullback, Darrel McDonald.

In March of 1991, Sheens summoned McDonald to his office.

“I was thinking, This can’t be good! Into the office!” McDonald told The Milk. “I deadset thought I was being cut.”

It was the opposite. The great Gary Belcher had been injured in round one. McDonald would be playing fullback on the Friday night against Parramatta Eels.

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“And, to protect me from the media, Sheensie named Belcher in the program,” McDonald said. “And he told me not to tell anybody. Like, anybody. I did tell mum and dad the night before.

“Anyway, it turned out great,”

It certainly did. He caught his first high ball. He played with confidence. He tore about in U/21s jumper No.42 and scored one of the Raiders’ 10 tries in the 48-10 demolition of Parramatta Eels. And he did it with his mates.

“There were three Rams juniors in the game: myself, Gaff and Paul Martin. And we all scored tries. So, it was like being at Phillip District with the Rams boys but you’re there with Stuart, Daley, Clyde, Meninga, the Walters brothers,” McDonald said.

“And Brett Kenny was Parra’s five-eighth. It was unbelievable.”

Great story, right? Local kid done good? So, why not let the local scribes tell it? Lynch found it ridiculous. He fronted Sheens.

“Mate – if these blokes can handle the pressure of first grade bloody rugby league they can handle answering a few questions in front of a journo and a camera,” Lynch reasoned.

Sheens wouldn’t budge. And by the time the Raiders won their third premiership in 1994, players would barely talk to local press at all, according to Lynch.

“There was a real ‘we don’t need the media’ attitude. It started from the top of the administration and in turn led to some of the leading players, in particular, refusing to make themselves available. They were becoming impossible to deal with. They’d become quite full of themselves,” Lynch said.

He went higher: John McIntyre, son of the Godfather, Les McIntyre, nicknamed “JR” after JR Ewing, the boss daddy in the soap opera Dallas. While McIntryre junior had stepped down as CEO following the salary cap scandal of 1991, he remained a senior and influential figure at the club. If you wanted to plead a case, JR was the man.

So Lynch did: The media needs access. Media promotes your club, your brand. It’s like free advertising. But there must be quid pro quo.

McIntyre, to his credit, knew that. He organised a feast in the posh Oak Room at the Hyatt Hotel. Also in attendance were Sheens and chief executive Kevin Neil, along with four heavy hitters of Canberra media - Lynch, Tim Gavel (ABC), Phil Small (WIN TV) and Peter Chapman (Capital Television). And there, in that venerable, mahogany hall of power, the quorum supped fine wines and enjoyed the finest meats, and a few hours later invented the press conference.

They didn’t invent the press conference. But they sort of did, at least in rugby league.

Lynch and his posse convinced Raiders’ heavies that it was in everyone’s interest that, before a match and after, the coach and nominated players would front a raft of cameras and journalists, and answer questions about the match. Promote the damned game.

The reasoning was: In any bit of theatre - a movie, a play, a game of rugby league on the television - the drawcards are the stars. And each weekend, footy players are the stars of a bit of theatre. And it is from these people that fans - consumers of your theatre - want to hear.

Today, standard. Then, far too progressive.

In fact, Planet Rugby League hated it.

Wayne Bennett huffed in his Wayne Bennett way, “Typical Canberra – who are we, politicians?” He refused to sit for cameras. If they wanted to talk to him, he’d be in the Broncos’ shed, standing up as he always had.

It was a similar story for Manly coach Bob Fulton. Fuck ‘em. Canberra wankers.

Soon enough, however, the league mandated that every club do it.

Even still, pre-match pressers in Canberra weren’t greatly attended. There’d be Lynch and Gavel, and assorted “microphone holders” – reporters who didn’t ask questions - generally from radio, recording grabs.

And thus the two senior journalists developed a protocol, an understanding: Lynch would ask the first questions so he could get his stuff on the television by the end of the news. Gavel would go next and get quotes for stories with Aunty.

One day, the applecart was upset. For there, firing a question without notice over the top to David Furner was a tall, young woman who, in the parlance, did not appear backward in coming forward.

Gavel looked at her daggers: What is the meaning of this? Who is this insolent piece of work?

Lynch was equally taken aback yet was more forgiving. Because he understood. As he said later to Gavel: “That takes balls. That’s how you get to the top.”

“Her?” Gavel scoffed. “She’ll never get anywhere.”

She would, though.

Because Erin Molan was in the house.

The team is in and the news - while not unexpected - is pleasing: potent five-eighth Ethan Strange is named to start in No.6 while Origin-class hitman Hudson Young has served his sentence for tackling.

Young replaces the unlucky Joe Roddy - whose bashed-up hand will rule him out until mid-June - and will form a potent second-row alongside the in-form Simi Sasagi. Ata Mariota heads back to the interchange and will wear No.16.

Elsewhere, Owen Pattie heads up the ladder to his customary No.14 while Chevy Stewart slides back back down the snake to No.18. He was good against the Goldie; his time will come.

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In the backs, with Strange at five-eighth, Kaeo Weekes heads back to fullback (where he spent plenty of last Saturday anyway) and the quality and versatile running man, Daine Laurie, keeps the No.15 jumper and resumes his position on the interchange bench.

In other not-unexpected-but-still-pleasing news, Jayden Brailey maintains his hold upon the lock jumper, more of the following he might find a home.

Tough game coming, of course. And the bad boys from the Riff won’t cough up pill like the Gold Coast wax-heads.

But there was plenty to like from Saturday.

And I like us Sunday afternoon.

Up the Milk:

1 Kaeo Weekes

2 Savelio Tamale

3 Sebastian Kris

4 Matthew Timoko

5 Jed Stuart

6 Ethan Strange

7 Ethan Sanders

8 Corey Horsburgh

9 Tom Starling

10 Joseph Tapine (C)

11 Hudson Young

12 Simi Sasagi

13 Jayden Brailey

Interchange

14 Owen Pattie

15 Daine Laurie

16 Ata Mariota

17 Morgan Smithies

18 Chevy Stewart

19 Jordan Uta

Reserves

20 Ethan Alaia

21 Jack Clydsdale

22 Sione Finau

Them? They here.

There’s a fullback in the six, a fullback in the 14, a utility in the one. Three hookers roam the greater XIX. Ricky Stuart is moving chess pieces about like he’s playing someone who is very good at chess, and countering their moves with manoeuvres of his own, parrying attacks to the flanks, and things something something.

Regardless! Kaeo Weekes will start at five-eighth, Daine Laurie is into fullback and Owen Pattie is welcomed back from his stint in reserve grade and listed fourth on the six-man bench.

Good to see. Pattie’s spell in NSW Cup has likely been beneficial for all-important leg minutes but has coincided with something of a meh period for our busted, spluttering Green Machine, who are three-from-eight and tied 14th on the Telstra Premiership ladder.

Plenty time, of course. But be good to nab a “W” on the Goldie while so busted. And you can guarantee Stuart will be tapping into underdog this, they-all-hate-us-the-bastards that, in the gnarly way of a man who’s fourth all-time games coached and is skilled in the ways of angry-man-management.

Helping his endeavour is another welcome and big In, Simi Sasagi, who will bop about in the second-row with Ata Mariota, whose work in the post-match bin-whack song is best practice. Both men need monster games today on the Gold Coast where light rain is predicted.

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In the backs, Laurie was very good in the whacking by Wests Tigers at Leichhardt last Thursday, while Savelio Tamale ran for a thousand and had his best game of the year.

It will also be quite cool seeing “Special K” Weekes sniping around the ruck, you can guarantee the Titans will be aware of the threat. This could open things up for other snipey types, Tom Starling, Raider Nation turns our roaming eyes upon you, something.

We might even see The Future, if a pair of pups, Jordan Uta and Ethan Alaia, pop up somewhere in the chaos, the latter did some fun stuff in the Cup last year.

Stuart’s sheet shuffling has been necessitated, of course, by so many big Outs.

Xavier Savage (ankle) Noah Martin (two ankles), Zac Hosking (head) Josh Papalii (calf) and Matty Nicholson (shoulder) languish on the injured list in various states of disrepair. Ethan Strange (ankle) failed a fitness test on Friday morning.

This didn’t happen last season and we trotted out a same-same XVII most weeks and continuity bred confidence and begat a minor premiership, a feat still under-rated by “the game”, more should be made of it, it’s an outrage, etc.

Them? Who knows what to make of Them. They’re less consistent than pissed

AJ Brimson is back, a decent piss-bolter. Tino Fa’asuamaleaui is Joe Tapine with worse hair. And Jayden Campbell is a fine and fluid running man whom Titans coach Josh Hannay has piloting the team about in No.7 because … dunno. Lachlan Ilias can only play five-eighth? Someone has to do it? Something about, as the kids say, six, seven?

Whatevs, Titans.

Team lists as follows.

We we win by four.

Up the Milk.

Zac Hosking is out with concussion, Noah Martin with an ankle injury, while Simi Sasagi will have a fitness test on his hamstring to test whether he slots back into the pack at No.12 following a successful hit-out in the centres.

Hooker Jayden Brailey’s been named at lock, Corey Horsburgh in the front row, and Owen Pattie and Jordan Uta on the extended interchange.

And named as Reserves, as encouragement for good work in NSW Cup is Ethan Alaia, Jake Clydsdale and Sione Finau, three lads who don’t look long out of Year 11 at Erindale College.

With Hudson Young still a week away and Josh Papali’i still nursing his venerable calf muscle - hurry back, old mates - it’s a XXII with people all over the place.

Regardless, it can’t be worse than whoever those people were who dropped all the ball at Leichhardt Oval last Thursday night in the ignominious defeat by Wests Tigers.

Now, Wests Tigers were good. They play direct and strong, and with high confidence. But the Dragons would look good, too, if you give them the ball 12 times, and allowed them to go bombs away with their virulent-pissed supporter pack roaring them home.

As for them … Been a long time between wins for the Westies, seems they must’ve forgotten how to win with dignity. You’ll cop a stirring, of course. Ripping off the clap, fair game.

But being told to fuck off, fuck you, whatever else, well. You sense old Huddo will be roaring out onto the pitch when we host the joint venture at GIO Stadium at 3pm on Saturday 25th of July.

Further in team news, good news that Daine Laurie will again be bolting about in dynamic style while Joe Roddy will again get into his robust work in the middle-edges, thereabouts.

Them? Here.

Us? Scroll on down.

Up the Milk:

1 Kaeo Weekes

2 Savelio Tamale

3 Sebastian Kris

4 Matthew Timoko

5 Jed Stuart

6 Ethan Strange

7 Ethan Sanders

8 Corey Horsburgh

9 Tom Starling

10 Joseph Tapine (C)

11 Ata Mariota

12 Simi Sasagi

13 Jayden Brailey

Interchange

14 Chevy Stewart

15 Daine Laurie

16 Joe Roddy

17 Morgan Smithies

18 Owen Pattie

19 Jordan Uta

Reserves

20 Ethan Alaia

21 Jack Clydsdale

22 Sione Finau

Regan’s team-mate and hooker, Jay Hoffman, sidled up to Regan and murmured, “Tell me you didn’t bite him.” Regan smiled through tombstone teeth and replied: “Bloody oath I did. And I’d do it again.”

At a hearing nine days later, Mansfield told NSWRL judiciary chair Jim Comans that he’d seen “the black headgear of Terry Regan” and noted a piercing pain under his nipple.Mansfield added that he’d approached Pickard and lifted his jersey to display two rows of teeth marks on the lower reaches of his left pectoral muscle.

For his part, Pickard told Comans that Regan had appeared to push his head into the Parramatta player’s stomach area.

Though he’d confessed otherwise to Hoffman on the field - and had been before the NSWRL judiciary the year before on a charge of biting Wally Lewis on the forehead during a Panasonic Cup match at Leichhardt Oval between Eastern Suburbs Roosters and Combined Brisbane - Regan assured Comans that it could not possibly have been he that had bitten Mansfield because he wore a mouthguard to protect his chipped teeth.

Adding to Regan’s defence was Raiders coach Don Furner who opined, with so many years of orthodontic experience, that it was “unlikely [Regan] would leave two rows of teeth marks on a player’s body by biting through the jersey.”

Comans, though, wasn’t having it. He was known as “The Hanging Judge”, and reveled in the moniker. He was the game’s “new broom”, handing out massive, 15-month bans to back-rowers Bob Cooper (Western Suburbs Magpies) and Les Boyd (Manly Warringah Sea Eagles).

While the rubbing out of Boyd for an eye-gouge on Billy Johnstone – three games back from a 12-month suspension for breaking Daryl Brohman’s jaw – was perhaps understandable, Cooper had been, unfortunately for him, successfully fighting several Illawarra Steelers players, and had broken Lee Pomfret’s jaw when the winger had unwisely come in to break up a flurry of hay-makers.

Comans told Cooper: “Acts such as these must be obliterated from the game, and I’ll begin by obliterating you.”

The Hanging Judge waxed as lyrically after hearing Regan’s defence.

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Well, be better if it was Sunday afternoon and you’d come from a pub crawl up Norton Street and were watching on the hill with a tin of cold delicious and a giant hot dog. That would’ve been very good.

Yet Leichhardt by night remains a cracker of a footy ground, even if it is, if we’re honest, a decrepit old shit-house.

Ha. No, it’s not, it’s good. And three or four times a year they put 15,000 in it and the fans hang from the trees and sit on the rooves and roar like they’ve filled the MCG. Top stuff, Tiger people.

And thus, we’ll do it tough against these high-confidence Benji-ballers, not the least because we’ll trot out a XVII with no Hudson Young (suspended), Josh Papalii (calf) or in-form hot-rod Simi Sasagi (hamstring). And that’s a bummer because you like watching them play.

But this will happen in this man’s National Rugby League, and it gives us a chance to inspect and critique the Next Men In outside heading somewhere cold to watch them in the Cup.

So, who are these people?

Joe Roddy is the second-cousin-of-sorts of Raider No.12, Frank Roddy, I had a Scanlen’s Gum card of him in a terrible lime-green zoot suit circa 1983. Like so many of that inaugural troop, Frank was a Queanbeyan Bluesman and a straight-running centre partner of either Peter McGrath, Craig Bellamy or one-year club captain, Allan McMahon.

It is chronicled on the Facebook, Frank was a “tough man and a great bloke” who was man-of-the-match in a Brickies versus Giralang Tavern fixture at Giralang Oval back in the day.

Further, it is written, Roddy built the cattle auctioneer WJ Gibbs’ sale-yards at Oaks Estate, effectively in Queanbeyan, but technically on the Territory side of the Railway Street border.

So there you go.

Regardless! As we have seen this year, young Joe goes alright, his attributes well-documented within these very e-pages prior to the round four fixture against Cronulla Sharks, check it out, come back, we’ll wait.

Who else? Daine Laurie, is who else. He’s a beauty, Daine Laurie; a slice-and-dicer, a lot of footy player, a fellow who can play multiple positions. Also a top trainer and team man, is what they’re saying. He’s 26, has played 49 games for Wests Tigers and 24 for Penrith Panthers, and he will, as they, do. Good for a try and/or an assist, get on while there’s still time.

With Sasagi’s untimely hamstring twinge, Savelio Tamale wins a stay of execution and slots into the centres wearing jumper No.19 and thus will not likely have to play reserve grade against Western Suburbs Magpies at Lidcombe Oval on Anzac Day, which would not be grouse fun.

It means Seb Kris retains his wing position - don’t mind him there, he’s a beauty, Seb Kris - yet also means 20-year-old development player Mark Tuialii has been deemed not yet set for first grade.

Tuialii has come up from SG Ball and Jersey Flegg, has had two seasons in NSW Cup, and they reckon is an “exciting outside-back with hard-hitting defence and silky ball playing skills” who is “one to watch in 2026”.

Only if you’re out at Lidcombe on Saturday, however.

Yet we win tonight as we won last week against perennial hard-acres, Melbourne Storm: bash them. And bash them again. The defence against Storm last week, in parts, was outstanding. They had to break, and they did. It’s hard to keep up because it’s quite tiring. But it’s brutal and effective, and will set the speed men up for hot-stepping action.

Them? They’re flying, the Tigers, at least relatively for a club that finished 13th in 2025, a position considered quite good after three consecutive wooden spoons. And now they’re equal-second, just a game behind the Panthers, and they reckon the tiger-themed kit is out at Birchgrove.

And why not? Their spine is top shelf. Jahream Bula is a long-striding try-man, Api Koroisau’s approaching Origin form, Adam Doueihi is among the smartest sevens going about, and Jarome Luai is relishing the “C”, and jagging around like a dervish. He’s a beauty, Luai, and will take some monstering from the Raiders, see above re: D v Storm.

There is more. The home side gets plenty from the hard-running wing-man, Sunia Turuva. Rangy wide-runner Kai Pearce-Paul has shades of Haumole Olakau’atu about him. And there’s a chunky boy on the bench, Jock Madden, who’s been around the block, in the Broncos system and is back in Concord or wherever they train, and seems to have made the utility No.14 jumper his own given Koroisau plays such big minutes.

I like ‘em. They’re doing to everyone what we did last year - surprise, surprise, surprise, and feasting on the lack of respect, shoving it back in critics’ very faces, and using it all as fuel for 80-minute expression sessions. Ricky Stuart would be nodding along.

To that end, have a gander at Mick Crawley’s piece on the Fox site here. Possibly not telling rusted-on Raider folk anything new, but still an evocative nod to the Ways of the Footy Club, and our man Sticki, and what’s going on in the joint.

I like us tonight, and predict Canberra Raiders 34 (Stuart 2, Kris, Laurie, Hosking, Starling tries; Sanders 5/6) defeat Wests Tigers 22 (Turuva 2, Bula, Koroisau tries; Doueihi 3/5).

Up the Milk.

As suspected, Hudson Young has a couple weeks off after practicing what league scholars might label “defence” while Josh Papali’i will nurse his venerable calf muscles after one of the pinged the great man on Friday night.

Which means there’s a couple new guys into the XVII - Daine Laurie and Joe Roddy - both of whom slide onto the bench.

Them? Here.

Us? Scroll on down.

Up the Milk:

1 Kaeo Weekes

2 Sebastian Kris

3 Simi Sasagi

4 Matthew Timoko

5 Jed Stuart

6 Ethan Strange

7 Ethan Sanders

10 Joseph Tapine (C)

9 Tom Starling

8 Ata Mariota

11 Noah Martin

12 Zac Hosking

13 Corey Horsburgh

Interchange

14 Jayden Brailey

15 Daine Laurie

16 Joe Roddy

17 Morgan Smithies

Reserves

18 Chevy Stewart

19 Savelio Tamale

And breathe.

The Storm? Dangerous people. A historical powerhouse limping into round seven with four mighty “L”s forming a conga-line of despair and disbelief given that, on paper, certainly in terms of their spine, they’re not far from the same pack of superstars and man-beasts who contested the last two grand finals. And surely such DNA is fixed in the feared purple monster of the south.

Or perhaps it is not. For they’re missing some key people whom one might describe as “big ones”, even if it was suggested that the giant man of Fiji, Tui Kamikamica - who suffered a stroke - a stroke! - may make a “shock return”. Yet Tui remains at rest, a good place for him because he’s a beauty, and good day to you sir if you’re reading.

Elsewhere, and it shows that depth isn’t bubbling over even among top-four aspirants, Storm’s other “Outs” - Eliesa Katoa, Xavier Coates and Ryan Papenhuyzen - have left a good-sized hole in their point-scoring potency.

But enough of Them, and how about Us! Fresh from the rampage over Rabbitohs in the very far west - my but that was some entertaining and confidence-boosting action, even if Savelio Tamale has been sent back to reggies to assess high-ball-catching and decision-making when runaway try-scoring. He’ll be back. But coach has made a reasonable call, the boy’s form has been poop.

The defence at the end? Understandable. It’s a tiring game, rugby league, and the way it’s played today with the six-agains and penalties, you have to do it to them before they do it to you. And we did, and two points are in the can, Bubba, they don’t paint pictures on scorecards.

Big news, of course, is the cometh backeth of the man, the dasher, Matty Timoko, to do more than whack the Gatorade bin with a boot, really, really, really hope he does his best to remain in the top grade, because when he’s bopping about he’s a hard nugget to prevent bopping about. I like him. Like a Kiwi Kerry Boustead.

Seb Kris to the wing? Makes sense - he’s as fast as anyone (true, they measured him) and a good and big body to bring the ball from danger, and to barrel and leap near the corner flag. He’s among the first picked each week, a consistent man and you like him for a try or two tonight.

Yet we win this crunch fixture versus so-called Melbourne Storm through our big units - Josh Papalii, Joe Tapine, Morgan Smithies, Corey Horsburgh - the four horses of the mega-pocalypse, something-something. For when these four fellows are charging up guts and mugging opponents, it is tiring and painful stuff, and opens up holes later for nippy ones, along with our all-action men - Zac Hosking, Simi Sasagi and, my man, how about him last week, Hudson Young, destroyer of worlds. What a ripper. He’s a multi-function polis, whatever that was, like three or four different players, last week he saved a try and scored one in the same play, I haven’t liked a backrower this much since Dean Pay.

Our man Smithies also had a blinder last week against Souths, and is very much the glue of that forward pack, like a Pommy version of Brent Todd. Big Toddy didn’t get a lot of wraps but he knew his role and was fit-for-purpose. And lo did he charge into the maelstrom time and again, freeing up space for his galaxy of backline stars, as an old mate from Cousin Rah Rah once said, the forward pack decides who wins, the backs decide by how much.

Raiders by 12.

Up the Milk.