Sunday night’s game between the Roosters and Raiders was an intriguing prospect on paper, and came down to a heartbreaking two-point loss for the hosts, who botched multiple opportunities to send it to golden point, or even win it straight. James Tedesco was backing up from the worst Origin season of his career, and Lindsay Collins from winning Man of the Match for the Maroons,while Daniel Tupou was on 137 tries, two shy of Antony Minichiello’s record, while Angus Crichton was marking his 150^th  match, and Sandon Smith only his fourth.

On the other side of the Steeden, the Raiders had won five straight on the road, and must have been pumped for their first trip to the new Allianz ground, especially against a Sydney outfit that have seriously struggled with attack in recent weeks. Yet despite these differences, both teams would suffer a chronic dearth of forwards across the night, as the Chooks lost Crichton, Jake Turpin and Egan Butcher in the back half (with Sitili Tupouniua and Nat Butcher absent) and the home crowd had to watch Josh Papalii trot off just ten minutes after kickoff.

If Teddy’s slump only intensified over the course of this match, the player who most personified the Roosters’ rocky fortune was Joey Manu. After his stunning fullback work during Origin while his custodian was with the Blues, he only made two runs until the dying minutes of the first half, when he promptly scored before and after the break, narrowly saving the Chooks from eight scoreless halves this year (including in their two-point victory over Newcastle last week), only to botch the final quarter try that could have won them the game.

Josh Papalii took the first carry of the evening, and the Chooks packed in the defence to keep him at the ten metre line. Likewise, Joe Tapine failed to break the twenty, while Corey Horsburgh could barely breach it, thanks to a combined shot from Lindsay Collins and Jake Turpin, who would go on to make some of the best tackles of his recent career tonight. On the other side of the Steeden, Collins was over halfway by midway through the next count, before Luke Keary kicked to the corner, where Seb Kris took control with a nice clean collect.

Tapine made a couple of post-contacts late in the following set, but Canberra still struggled for position, as Jack Wighton booted it close to his thirty. For the second time in a row, Sydney started from their thirty, while Jared Waerea-Hargreaves followed Collins by hitting Raiders territory midway through the count, before Keary kicked to the left edge again too. Like Kris before him, Rapana didn’t face much pressure beneath the high ball, but this was still a methodical and focused approach from Sydney, even if Joey Manu hadn’t got a touch so far.

A dummy half run from Zac Woolford elasticised the next Canberra set, and although they didn’t quite make the opposition half, they were close enough that Wighton’s bomb prevented Teddy’s return bringing him beyond the twenty. This was the first positional challenge for the Roosters, as Teddy tried and failed to dummy his way into space up the right, and so Sandon Smith broke with Keary’s kicking pattern by sailing the next one down the right as well, where Albert Hopoate fielded it effectively before taking a run on tackle two.

So far, then, the Raiders had given as good as they got, and followed now with the best improvisation so far, as Rapana briefly shifted into the centres to open space up the left, and finally bring them into Sydney City territory for the first time this evening. Jamal Fogarty built on that momentum with the first truly dangerous kick of the night too – a spinning bomb that split Tedesco and Junior Pauga, who could only ricochet it back into the field of play where Hudson Young would have most likely scored if Egan Butcher hadn’t grabbed it while offside.

With the first penalty of the match, Canberra opted to take the two, putting Jarrod Croker on 2324 career points, and providing them with the energy they needed to start busting their way out of their own end. Papalii may have been kept to the ten, in a flashback to the first carry of the game, but Tapine now found the post-contacts that he’d been searching for, muscling his men to twenty-five out and laying a platform for Elliott Whitehead to cross the thirty. Fogarty hoisted it high once again, and Daniel Tupou didn’t get much of a return off it.

The Roosters had to hit back with the defence that had given them such power in the opening minutes, and so Turpin led the pack with a bone-rattling low shot on Kris that made Collins’ contact on top feel like a mere afterthought. Nevertheless, Canberra responded with their first real burst up the left, although it was over as soon as it began when Wighton flicked the footy out to Hopoate, but sent it crashing over the sideline instead, thanks in large part to some amped-up involvement from Manu, who got right up in his face to engineer the error.

JWH resumed the Sydney City flow on the next set, making twenty post-contacts through Young, who was so overwhelmed by the sheer brunt of the impact that Emre Guler eventually had to come in low to secure the tackle. Galvanised by that defensive effort on Wighton, Manu finally had his first touch of the footy, bringing his men to their best field position so far, thirty-five out from the line, where they received six again off a ruck error from Croker. Yet Canberra hit back with two tackles that – distantly – set the stage for their opening try.

The first tackle was gestural as much as anything else, a riposte to the stellar spectacle of that post-contact run from JWH, who was now lifted to the very brink of the horizontal by a combined Woolford-Guler hit. Next, Croker made up for his ruck mistake with aplomb, slamming into Smith at just the right angle to force the footy loose as the stand-in half tried to duck out. The contrast between veteran and young gun couldn’t have been clearer, and Rapana exuded the same drive when he sets his eyes squarely on the Giraffe a high ball later.

There wasn’t even a hint of playing the ball here, and yet the sheer determination of Rapana’s gaze felt like another critical notch in this Canberra escalation, which reached its apotheosis through two brilliant Fogarty kicks. The first was the most lethal bomb of the game so far, a mercurial spiraling effort that cleared the top of the stadium, and looked set to rest twenty metres out from the crossbars, only to careen so obliquely off the turf that it was five metres away from the left sideline by the time that Pauga managed to scoop it on the second bounce.

Smith’s lack of experience came to the fore again here, since he couldn’t offer much in the way of a riposte with his next kick, a muted semi-bomb that Kris collected easily. A few enterprising plays now ensued, as Kris made such aggressive post-contacts two tackles in that it took a three-man pack to ankle tap him to ground, and Tapine offloaded back for Fogarty to set up a sweeping left edge attack, which turned into third phase play once Wighton offloaded on the ground for Croker, who managed to play it quickly despite Manu’s defence.

That all set the stage for Fogarty’s second beauty with the boot, an end-over-ender that descended directly above the chalk, where Wighton managed to climb a full metre above a contorted Tedesco, and keep his ball-carrying arm marginally off the ground when he tumbled over the New South Wales fullback, until Radley slid him in goal for the first try of the night.  Canberra had now nabbed the first four points in the sixth of their last seven games against the Chooks, although in every other instance the try had been delivered by the forward pack.

On the other side of the Steeden, the Roosters had conceded the first try in seven straight matches this season, although the news wasn’t all good for the away crowd either. Not only did Croker have a shocker with the kick, shanking it out to the right of the posts, but word came down from the sheds that Papalii would be out for a couple of weeks with a hamstring strain. Things went from bad to worse when Rapana lost the kickoff backwards in goal, Guler knocked it on, and the Tricolours went from defending a restart to the first dropout tonight.

They settled into some of their most sweeping play so far, heading left where Teddy tipped the footy on to Tupou, who in turn popped it back inside to Billy Smith a millisecond before being dragged over the sideline. Radley straightened the attack again on the left, and from there the Roosters swung right, where Teddy, who was having a rough sequel to his Origin II performance, failed to reprise the Tupou-Smith combo. Booting it into the corner, his chase was good, but he couldn’t clear touch to set up a second bat-in after a clutch Pauga effort.

The Raiders capitalised immediately, with a left sweep on play four of the next set that crystallised around a pair of offloads that were so in sync that it was like watching two parts of the same footy brain. Wighton sent the Steeden out the back to Croker, who ran deep into the line, and shaped to offload to Hopoate on his outside, only to break through the Manu tackle, make another ten metres, and offload back inside to Young as Pauga and Smith converged on him. Nevertheless, Hopoate would get his moment to shine a few seconds later.

Continuing the momentum of Croker’s inspired second phase play, Young swiveled around a low tackle from Tedesco, and fed it back out for Hopoate to beat both Rapana and Wighton for most Canberra tries (7) in 2023. The Sydney skipper was barking out for a forward pass from Young, but Ash Klein had already called it, and this time Croker nailed the sideline kick, spinning the Steeden straight through the posts. Fogarty also maintained his composure with the boot, concluding the restart with an enormous kick that forced Teddy deep into his ten.

Clearly frustrated with this sequel to his lacklustre Origin performance, Tedesco tried to muscle some position later in the set, but his efforts came to naught when a tough Wighton tackle forced a play-the-ball error from Crichton.The Raiders were now sitting at 518-379 run metres, 6-2 offloads and 3-8 missed tackles, and had reached the apex of their first forty flow as they packed the subsequent scrum. Yet this set played as an awkward and muted echo of the last, starting with Young unable to quite nail the on-the-ground offload this time around.

Fogarty’s boot also proved to be a little less damaging too, producing a dropout that Butcher deflected off his left calf, reined in with his right, and then basically sat on before popping it to ground. It wasn’t pretty, and Smith wasn’t even halfway down the park by the time he took the kick, but for a brief moment it looked like the Roosters had survived. Canberra proved them wrong on the next set though, as a Rapana offload set up Wighton to goose step, dummy and clear up space for Croker to explore and elasticise the left edge of their attack. 

They seemed to loosen on this set, producing a sense of possibility as Fogarty took his first dangerous bomb in some time, and Teddy suffered his second pass beneath the high ball. Just as Wighton had climbed over him at the sixteenth minute, Kris got a metre start to tap the footy back for Matthew Timoko, who tucked it under the arm, and carved his way past Tupou and Pauga’s fingertips, before circling around to put it down behind the crossbars. Croker had his easiest kick of the night, and his second last; the visitors would only get two more points.

Every time Canberra have kept the Chooks scoreless in the first half they’ve won, an especially worrying stat given that the Tricolours had only averaged 16.3 points per game in 2023, and the green machine were now at 18. The visitors didn’t show any signs of slowing down either, as Guler won a penalty early in the restart, thanks to an offside from Crichton, bringing his men to the twenty with half their tackles left. Sydney needed a big defensive statement now, and Smith and Crichton provided it by converging on Young for an enormous save at the ten.

Add a second frustrated grubber from Fogarty that Drew Hutchison took on the ground, and there was a glimmer of hope for the Roosters here, especially once Nathan Brown trotted on to add some fresh energy to the forwards, in place of Radley, who hadn’t made a massive impact so far on his return from suspension. Young got his revenge for the Smith-Crichton combo a moment later with a brutal shot to keep Teddy in the ten beneath yet another Fogarty bomb, and the skipper responded by attempting to make his first break on play four.

Wighton was there to contain him, but it was also Wighton who gave the Chooks their next chance, with a tricky pass that Tom Starling put down late in the count. They then got six again inside the thirty, thanks to a ruck error from Pasami Saulo, and gradually started to restore their attacking mojo, from a Brown tip-on that almost set up Terrell May’s first NRL try beside the right post, to a right sweep that forced Croker to slam in for a desperate trysaver on Pauga, and finally a Smith grubber that Woolford knocked back before Kris finally got it down.

Woolford’s fingertips were only a fraction ahead of Teddy’s, so the Roosters were lucky not to have a knock-on in goal here, and while Timoko almost punched his way into the defensive line on play one of the next set, the last tackle option was a whimper, as Fogarty opted to eschew the bomb in favour of a quick dart across the park and pass for Wighton, who weighted it much too hard. With two minutes on the clock, and seven scoreless halves this season, Sydney had to make the most of their next opportunity – a slow peel from Woolford.

One of the Roosters’ biggest issues so far had been their failure to unlock Manu – or Joey’s failure to unlock himself. In stark contrast to his stint as stand-in fullback, he’d only made two touches in the centres tonight, and made a few defensive misreads as well. The whole frustration around Manu now condensed into the first real right side raid for the Roosters, as Keary tried to find him through a Wighton tackle. He failed the first time, but managed to twist around in the contact until he had just enough space to send the Steeden to his no. 4.

Seeing Manu frustrated, then enabled, was one of the most galvanising spectacles of the game, and the lanky backliner responded in kind – getting inside Horsburgh, smashing Kris to ground, and slamming down beneath Saulo beside the right padding in only his third carry of the evening. Smith sent the kick through the posts, and if the Roosters couldn’t quite trot into the sheds with their heads held high, they’d managed to stamp their mark on the game at last, and it was this confidence that most likely kept Canberra tryless over the second stanza.

Crichton became the next big man to hit the sidelines over the break, with a right knee issue, a pity in his 150^th milestone, but the Roosters still rolled down the middle of the park on their first set back, and were into opposition territory by midway through the count. Smith got boot to ball at the Canberra forty, Kris ploughed the return into three Sydneysiders, and Wighton got his kick about the same spot as the Roosters halfback, meaning the visitors were inside the Raiders’ red zone on only their second set in the back forty, two tackles up their sleeve.

All it took was a Keary bomb to the right wing for Manu to execute a sublime sequel to bookend the sheds with two of his best tries of the season. Leaping above Croker, he took the footy in both hands, landed on his left boot, maintained just enough balance to turn around and stretch out his right hand, and even then had to expand his wingspan so dramatically that only his pinkie finger was exerting downward pressure by the time the Steeden crossed the chalk – an even more rousing spectacle after Tedesco’s struggle beneath the high ball tonight.

With Smith slicing the conversion just beside the right post, we were back to a six point game, as the Chooks now ended two sets prematurely in an attempt to further fuel their footy flow. Turpin tried to supercharge the restart with a 40/20, and while he had the angle, the weight wasn’t enough to propel the ball beyond the sideline before Kris cleaned it up. Still, a sterling Butcher-Radley chase ensured that Wighton was only just over halfway by the time he booted the shallowest spiral bomb of the night, allowing Teddy to get out of his twenty on the return.

Keary now followed Turpin with another early kick, and also weighted it a little hard. This got his men some breathing space but actually ended up working better for Canberra, who settled into their first really expansive play since the break now. Horsburgh offloaded early in the count, Wighton only just regained his balance to execute a left sweep, and the attack was brimming with a volatile energy that momentarily escaped the Raiders when Rapana’s next offload went astray, forcing Timoko to get on his bike to contain it five out from the sideline.

If the visitors had just managed to harness that escalating intensity they might have broken through here, but Radley and Smith regained control with a hit on Wighton that felt like a full stop on the set. Fogarty launched another bomb, and yet these huge kicks didn’t feel quite as dangerous as they had during the first stanza, even if Teddy had to stagger to within five metres of his line to take it, and even if Terrell May coughed up the footy beneath a three-man pile on, a critical moment for a pair of teams now sitting on 19/22 completions apiece.

Neither of the Raiders’ edge options off the scrum came to fruition, as Manu shut down Kris with a tough tackle on the left, and a poorly timed Fogarty pass split the difference between Saulo and Whitehead before his men could make it back to the right. Brown was raring to bust through the line as the Tricolors hit the thirty, Smith dummied and charged his way into the red zone, and Keary reprised the crossfield bomb that had assisted Manu, except that this time it was to the left, and this time Rapana saved the day by collecting it clean in both hands.

As if this wasn’t deflating enough for the Roosters, Egan Butcher became the next forward to leave the park, after a head clash with Tupou while trying to wrest the high ball from Rapana’s grasp, bringing JWH off the bench a little earlier than expected. Yet this loss only amped up Sydney City’s defence, as four Chooks surged in to keep Timoko at the ten, then three to keep Whitehead fifteen out, and then another three to prevent Horsburgh making more than a metre beyond the red zone, with the result that Fogarty had to boot it just outside his thirty.

With that muscular defence on display, the Raiders couldn’t have asked for a better time to get Tapine back off the bench, and he delivered almost immediately with an offload to Kris that set the stage for the Roosters’ most heroic defence of the night. The Canberra fullback stormed from halfway up the park to twenty-five out from the line, where he popped it across to Fogarty, who had open space all the way to the chalk. In this second, it looked like nothing could stop the halfback from capping off his night with the boot with an untouched crossover.

Cometh the hour cometh the man, as Tupou executed one of the most desperate jersey grabs we’ve ever seen, making contact with the green fabric five metres out, and even then stretching it to capacity to prevent Fogarty following Manu with an athletic reach-out, or even from offloading back to Kris on his inside, before Billy Smith slammed in on top to slow down the play-the-ball. Not done, however, Kris now popped it out for Rapana to tap it on to Timoko, who in turn sent it back in for his fullback to take a crack at the defensive line himself.

In response, Turpin and Teddy spearheaded a four-man pack to bring him down a blade of grass from the line, and the game reached peak volatility as Keary conceded six again as part of the fray, and Rapana followed with a wide ball out to Fogarty, prompting Radley to prove his mettle in the toughest run and tackle of the night. Both mirroring and pre-empting Rapana’s pass, he surged over from fifteen metres in field to smash into the Canberra halfback at the same instant as the Steeden, as if expelling his 2023 frustration in this stellar contact.

This succession of defensive efforts took the sting out of the Raiders’ attack, and so they wavered around the centre of the park until Fogarty bombed to the right edge, where Rapana came up with perhaps the best Canberra take of the night – leaping a metre above the Chooks to take the footy on the full, and then offloading back to Tapine a millimetre off the grass. At ground level and altitude this was a sublime gymnastic display, and with a knock-on from Teddy, adrenalin was surging across the scrum, which ended with Wighton putting it down.

Yet the agon now reached its peak as Keary was called offside, providing the Raiders with two easy points – the points that prevented the game from heading to golden point – as Croker struck the Steeden through the posts. It was a critical rallying-point for Teddy to take the next high ball, especially with Kris reaching out for it above him, and for a moment it looked like this might be the start of another Tricoloured tryscoring sequence, as the Roosters gathered a Young offload, a ruck error from Tapine garnered six again, and Collins trotted off the bench.

All the Chooks’ heartbreak tonight now condensed into the next sequence, which started with a Keary grubber on play four that came off the legs of Whitehead. The second-rower momentarily secured it, only for Teddy to strip it from him, and commence a right sweep that ended with Manu breaking the ten, five out from the sideline, holding the Steeden in his right hand, and shaping to offload for Pauga. It was the kind of dexterity he’s showcased a hundred times before, but here Hopoate applied just enough pressure for him to lose it at the death.

Strange as it might sound, this was a better outcome than an illegal Hoppa strip, since Pauga didn’t even bother to put the ball down when it bounced back. Fogarty’s boot was starting to feel lethal again now, and he consolidated Canberra’s flow with a stellar bomb from his own end that landed a metre out from the try line, while Sydney’s night got worse when Butcher was ruled out off the match, and Turpin left the park with 24 powerful tackles under his belt to deal with a rib complaint, bringing Drew Hutchison into the fray with an immediate bomb.

It couldn’t rival Fogarty, who responded with yet another bomb, followed by a tough Guler chase to shut down any Tedesco metres. The Raiders were dominant, but the game was still settling into an arm-wrestle, at least relative to what had come before, so Keary tried to break the deadlock with a crossfield run, hoping to set up something for Manu on the right. Not only did this option not congeal, but the final play didn’t come together either, as Teddy fed it out to Smith, and then tried to chase down a left foot grubber from his young gun halfback.

Foreshadowing the disheartening Teddy-Smith combo in the dying minutes of the match, Tedesco just couldn’t compete with Croker’s commitment to the footy here, and with Guler adding an offload to Starling early in the count, the Raiders were cresting, especially once Fogarty added a surplus of spin to his next bomb. Tupou survived it, and Collins rallied the troops with an offload back to Hutchison, only to then mess up his next pass, which landed on the boot of Smith, yet another setback in the growing deficit of Sydney City field position,

On the other side of the Steeden, Rapana was at his forty by tackle one of the next set, Kris was in enemy territory on the second, and only the most resurgent of tackles from Collins prevented Saulo making his way beyond the forty. Even then, a deft short side play saw Hopoate nabbing five post-contacts to arrive fifteen out from the chalk, in what looked set to be another Canberra tryscoring sequence, until Manu made up for botching a try by saving one, combining here with Smith for a brutal shot to spoil Croker’s party and keep it to 12-20.

Manu’s comeback galvanised the Roosters’ best defence of the night over the next set, which saw the Raiders glimpse their thirty, but only make fifteen net metres. After Tupou and Smith piled on to turn Rapana’s next stint beneath the high ball into a hospital catch, Timoko drifted crossfield, and found a Radley-Brown-Collins pack waiting to repel him at the ten. Likewise, JWH, Keary and Naufahu Whyte kept Kris in the red, before a driving tackle from Smith and Collins brought Young back to the twenty as he was on the cusp of breaking into the thirty.

Radley gave Rapana the same treatment, meaning that Fogarty was only fifteen from his own line when he made his least convincing kick of the game – a low wobbly ball that seemed to make the whole visiting side waver as well. With ten minutes on the clock, the Roosters had their chance, especially when Young got pinged for not being square at marker, propelling Collins into the twenty on tackle one. The Queensland Man of the Match couldn’t quite get the offload away, but nevertheless Brown was well inside the twenty on the very next play.

From there, JWH required three defenders to hold him up five metres from the right padding, before Teddy took a midfield run that started out searching, but ended up steadying. For a brief moment, he considered an offload, and in that second the set lost some of its momentum, leading to a filler run up the right before Smith continued his final quarter form by dabbing it back in field, where Starling bumped it over the dead ball line with a desperate Tedesco on his back. Yet the very man who set up the dropout was now the one to botch it.

Put that down to some brilliant vision from Rapana, who had angled the kicks towards the wings so far, but now sensed Smith’s inexperience straight ahead of him, and went short to ensure that Kris could grab it back. Just like that, Fogarty resumed the bombs, and Wighton and Starling contested the next one with a tough chase to prevent Tedesco making any metres off it. Looking urgent now, the Chooks targeted their right edge, once again trying to unlock Manu, who dummied and ran through a couple tackles to stride from one forty to the other.

It was a good start, but not enough to congeal the attack, much as the Roosters rared to reprise that sublime defensive stint on the next tackle, but in a more muted and minor key. While the Raiders did spend most of the set in their thirty, a Saulo-Starling offload still got them to the brink of halfway for the Fogarty kick, and it was perhaps the vulnerability in these aborted attacking and defensive sequences that prompted Whitehead to momentarily muscle JWH above the horizontal next time the two big boppers made contact up the middle.

All the Roosters’ stop-and-start momentum reached its climax and crisis now. Manu rared to go up the right, but had to wait until the tackle review was completed, before play paused a second time when Rapana cramped his leg after taking Keary’s kick over the left edge. A big consolidation was needed, and Brown got it rolling with a short ball for Radley to do what he does best – drive hard and fast into the line, where Saulo only just held him up five metres out, but not enough to slow down the play-the-ball that got Smith in prime position midfield.

The young halfback’s vision now constellated around a perfectly timed short ball to Collins, who slipped away from Whitehead and Guler, and completely outpaced Horsburgh, to cross all but untouched Steeden-first beneath the crossbar, rising with the roar of both his stellar Maroons performance and his first try in the Tricolours this season. Smith was always going to convert from right in front, bringing us to a two-point game, and came close to an assist on the restart, popping another short ball out for his fullback to sync the spine up the middle.

In any other game, this would have been the moment when Teddy brought home the Chooks with a trademark break, so to see him cough up the footy now felt like a death knell on the match, especially once Radley followed his superb setup for the Smith-Collins combo with a flashback to his early season ill discipline with a high shot on Croker tumbling to the ground. The Roosters remain well outside the eight, so they’ll welcome the bye points, and Canberra are a comfortable seventh, and will be raring for a big margin over the Dragons after Origin.