Opinion
The weekend’s footy was astounding. It didn’t even survive until Monday morning smoko
Dan Walsh
Sports ReporterRugby league couldn’t even make it to Monday morning smoko.
The week after the weekend that began with no screaming outrage. No howling indignation. No 24-hour storm over a trainer, a diver or a shyster, for what felt like the first time in months.
By 9.40am, the Titans email had landed, confirming that Des Hasler was done, the club sacking their coach for the fifth time in 11 years.
We almost made it to tea and bickies with no drama.
Still, Andrew Voss’s “Miracle in Mudgee” call of the Raiders 95-metre jailbreaking try is well-placed to join the game’s most iconic pieces of commentary.
Right there in the hall of fame alongside Ray Warren’s “that’s not a try, that’s a miracle” for Mark Coyne’s 1994 Origin match-winner, and Warren Smith’s 2012 “you can take me now I have seen it all” as Souths sprung the sweetest of last-minute, length-of-the-field stunners to defeat rivals the Sydney Roosters.
And then there’s Voss. Starting the weekend poignantly on fresh Central West air as Ethan Strange and Kaeo Weekes galloped for glory.
“That is the most remarkable rugby league moment. In the most remarkable rugby league season. In the most remarkable sport that is played on this planet.”
And by Sunday evening, that was, if anything, an understatement.
Beyond remarkable was Taylan May’s reprisal of the most famous try in Wests Tigers history with Benji Marshall sitting right there on the sideline at Leichhardt Oval.
Twenty years on and celebrating the 2005 grand final triumph over the Cowboys, the Tigers wore the same kit. May’s pass came, as it did two decades ago, with a few minutes left in the first half. He even came close to the same patch of left-edge turf as Marshall, with a tad more loop and lob than the Tigers coach in his pomp.
Eighteen hours earlier, Mark Nawaqanitawase instead rolled out the finest flick pass you’d ever hope to be on the end of.
The rugby convert’s audacious, all-or-nothing plays are now landing more often than not, with still less than a full NRL season to his name.
After Nawaqanitawase’s last show-stopping piece of bona fide brilliance – that hopping, skipping and kicking try against Canterbury in May – Trent Robinson made the point that rugby’s less risk-aversive nature encourages the code’s players to try their hand more than rugby league.
The Roosters coach was right. You’d be amazed how many NRL players, not to mention the next generation coming through, have these sorts of skills in their kitbag.
Parramatta put plenty on show themselves, as aside from Nawaqanitawase, the Roosters handling went to water.
South Sydney’s Tyrone Munro and Manly’s Tolu Koula scored fine long-range tries as two of the game’s most electric young talents.
For all the upheaval of their past 12 months, Daly Cherry-Evans and Ben Hunt celebrated significant 350-game milestones as two of the game’s oldest stagers.
So regularly rolling from controversy to outrage, indignation to mea culpas and then rinsing and repeating within the space of 48 hours, it was kind of nice to swing from one stunning moment to the next for a change.
Monday morning dawned and the roses were right there to be savoured.
Rugby league – that beautiful, steaming hot mess – waits for no one. Controversy, drama, sackings, paranoia and outrage act as the game’s red blood cells.
By afternoon smoko, Josh Hannay was the newest man given the job of trying to make the Titans relevant, but Brandon Smith’s latest off-field drama already had him in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. And then the ARLC decided to get into the game of charging players with foul play.
Rugba leeg – you almost made it.
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