Campo’s Corner: The pride, passion, misery and jubilation of Canberra’s grand final drought

In the second edition of Campo’s Corner for the week it’s time to get all types of emotional about the Canberra Raiders and their long grand final drought.

• CAMPO’S CORNER: The last men left standing

• DALLY M: Team of the year predictions

If the Raiders win the grand final on Sunday I have no idea how I’ll react.

Maybe I’ll just collapse in a puddle of tears before belatedly filing a story which is just the words “I can’t believe it” a few hundred times.

Maybe I’ll travel into the Blue Mountains and live in a shack well out of sight of any other living soul, eschewing the trappings of a civilisation which has clearly peaked and will now be trapped on an uninterrupted downward trajectory.

Maybe I’ll just walk the earth like Jules planned to at the end of Pulp Fiction, meeting people and having adventures after finally being irrevocably convinced of the existence of a higher power.

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The green machine are back in the grand final. Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images.

Maybe I’ll just walk into the ocean to become one with the earth. Maybe I’ll commandeer a bus, fill it with Raiders folks and drive straight to the ACT never to return. Maybe I’ll run on the field and do a backflip off the cross bar. Maybe I’ll change my name to Viking Campton. Maybe I’ll start wearing Jarrod Croker headgear in personal and professional situations.

I don’t know what I’ll do because despite the idea of Canberra winning a grand final being a dream of mine ever since I was old enough to have dreams, I’ve never fully considered what it would be like if they won.

There’s a reason the celebrations after the prelim were so jubilant. Since the golden era ended, grand finals just haven’t been part of the Raiders world.

For years, it seemed like this would never happen. AAP Image/Lukas Coch.

There were times when it really seemed like it never would happen. Ask a North Sydney fan about hardship, about being starved of success. They won two premierships in 1921-22, made a grand final in 1943, and that was it, for nearly 60 years, until the club withered and died.

These things can happen, even in a league designed for parity. It is possible for the crushing defeats to never end and for the future to never get as good as you want it to be. The Raiders could have ended up like poor old Norths.

Canberra were never bad in the way the Knights have been bad – they never bottomed out completely and claimed the wooden spoon, despite a couple of close calls in 2005 and 2014. They never felt as listless as the Titans – the occasional late season finals run put paid to that, even if they never really threatened for the title (with the notable exception of 2010).

For much of the last 25 years, the Raiders have just existed.

The Raiders just existed. They weren’t big enough to trouble the superpowers and they weren’t small enough to run with the battlers. Teams rose and fell around them, they stayed in the same place – in the 24 seasons, from 1995 to 2018, they finished between 6th and twelfth 18 times.

It’s wrong to pain these years as grim, endless winters cause they weren’t. The late season finals runs of 2008, 2010 and 2012 were all tremendously fun, and I’ll swear to my dying day they could have won the comp in 2010 if Terry Campese didn’t get injured.

(Quick aside – Jarrod Croker cops a lot of stick for his missed penalty against the Tigers that year, but it came after Campese had done his knee. Even if the Raiders had gotten through, winning two more games without their best player was a tall order. Say Campese stays fit though – they play the Dragons in the prelim when the hoodoo is at it’s highest and then face Todd Carney and the Roosters in the grand final. I refuse to believe God is cruel enough to have Carney defeat the Raiders in a grand final. Whatever, it’s not like I’ve thought about it twice a week for the last nine years, that would be crazy)

Jarrod Croker gets a bum rap. Photo by Stefan Postles/Getty Images.

The Raiders were built differently from a personal standpoint. There were precious few big money recruits – Brett White is the only incumbent Origin or Australia player they’ve signed since the 1980s. As a result, the fanbase rallied around unlikely heroes. If the club couldn’t give them what they need, they got it where they could.

Dane Tilse played 200 games for the Raiders. Trevor Thurling scored a hat-trick once. They didn’t have Nathan Hindmarsh, they had Ian Hindmarsh. The Origin players were guys like Adam Mogg and Ryan O’Hara. Clinton Schifcofske wasn’t just the club’s best player, he was a damn hero.

Trevor Thurling could only have been a Raider.

They recruited weird guys from weird places. Jason Smith came back from Super League for two good years, even though he was a packet a day smoker, as old as time itself and didn’t believe in running. David Milne was a fullback who was quick as the wind, but could only run in dead straight lines. Dimitri Pelo was a French international from New Caledonia. Craig Frawley was a reserve grader from Brisbane who came down on big money to be a reserve grader in Canberra. David Howell and Michael Robertson, Alan Rothery and Terry Martin, Brad Drew and William Zillman – anywhere else they might just be some of the other guys, Canberra was nothing but the other guys.

The Raiders found love in hopeless places. Photo by Mark Nolan/Getty Images.

There was always a tremendous amount of waiting when it came to supporting Canberra. Next year would always be our year, when the young fellas finally take that step up and Josh McCrone finally puts it together. When Campese’s injuries finally clear up, when Carney gets his act together, when there’s the right team around Dugan, when McLinden and McFadden get some time together, when Milford re-signs, when Jack Ahearn, Haydon Hodge and Mitch Cronin debut, when Travis Waddell, Mitch Cornish and Justin Carney find their feet in first grade, when all it works out, when we just make it over the hill, that’s when we’ll be great again, I just know it.

But those starts were always false. Campese, who gave everything he had to the Raiders, was betrayed by his body. Carney and Dugan, the young princes who the fanbase loved like sons, blew out of town. Anthony Milford got homesick. Blake Ferguson left under a cloud just when it looked like he’d be a Raider forever.

The Raiders were always relying on young fellas.

In 2000 and 2003 they made the top four but sputtered in the second week of the finals. In 2016 they went all the way to the prelim and could be proud of their performance despite the loss to Melbourne.

But none of those teams were as consistently excellent as this year. In 2000 only three competition points separated 2nd and 7th and the Raiders were steamrolled by the Roosters in Laurie Daley’s final ever game.

The 2003 team was wonderfully bizarre, built on tremendous seasons from Schifcofske and Simon Woolford, two of Canberra’s best players in the lean years.

They didn’t have a single Australian or Origin representative but won their first seven matches, never slipped lower than fourth all year and beat the high-flying Bulldogs two weeks out from the finals – but then got outfought by an embryonic Melbourne side and pipped at the post by the Warriors.

Jason Bulgarelli, a 27-year old rookie centre in his 10th NRL game, dropped a possible matchwinning try in the final minutes and his name became a curse.

Jason Bulgarelli had a tough time of it. Picture by Brett Costello.

In 2016 the Raiders were the idealised version of the team they’d become in the previous 10 years, a whirlwind of attacking football who turned attacking artform into a blood sport and ran up sinful amounts of points, because they never found a problem scoring tries couldn’t solve.

In the great tradition of Canberra’s attacking powerhouses of the new millennium, they were also insane – they knocked off the Storm and Sharks in back to back weeks but went to golden point with the one-win Knights twice. They should be proud of their efforts and will live in the club’s history forever, but they couldn’t take the final step.

This team is no guarantee to finish with glory either. The Roosters deserve their status as hot favourites. James Tedesco is the best player in the world, Luke Keary is hitting form at the right time and Cooper Cronk’s indomitable, unbreakable will is now focused squarely on Canberra’s demise.

The biggest issue for the Roosters is whether their club captain, who has barely played all year, can force himself into a squad that has crushed just about everyone they’ve faced this year without him. They are the Death Star, the planet-killers, with muscles on their muscles, to the manor born and blessed with the absolute certainty and clarity of purpose that comes with being rugby league blue bloods.

The Raiders face a tall task. Picture by Brett Costello.

The Raiders can do it though. They can win this game. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be fun, but they’ve run the Roosters close twice this year already and only one other side has scored more points against the Tricolours this year. The Raiders are a club who have celebrated their glory days while also feeling a little trapped by them – after the golden days from 1989 to 1994, what could possibly measure up? How could it ever be that good again?

I came along just too late to remember those premierships, but I’ve watched them so many times it almost feels like I do. I could recite the line-ups and tryscorers from each of Canberra’s grand final wins by the time I was eight. I can still rattle off the commentary for each try from the 1994 grand final. When I met Mal Meninga for the first time as a young fella it was like meeting God.

But really, that era belonged to another group of fans. Those misfits and youngsters who never kicked on, those were my guys. Finishing 6th to 12th and maybe snagging a win in the first week of the finals, that was my world. And as often as I dreamt of Canberra making another grand final, it never really felt possible until it actually happened.

They might lose on Sunday, and if they do that’ll suck, but wins like the one over Souths and weeks like this are why we follow sport in the first place. It’s why you believe in players who will never make and why you sit there in the freezing cold to watch them lose again, and why you trick yourself into believing that this reserve grader they dragged down from the Queensland Cup is the guy who will make The Difference, and why late season wins over other teams who can’t make the finals are treasured as the launch pads for future finals runs which never come and why you keep hoping and wishing and dreaming of better times.

These are the better times. This is why we wait for so long when it all looks lost. And if they do it, if they manage to pull it off and add a fourth title to the trophy case, keep an eye out for me, cause I don’t know what’ll happen next.

Originally published as Campo’s Corner: The pride, passion, misery and jubilation of Canberra’s grand final drought