Everyone told us we were in for the wooden spoon. Not quietly either. Pundits, punters, blokes at the servo who think a multi makes them footy philosophers.
“Too young. Too unsettled. New skipper, new combinations, tough travel.” I heard it all. And tucked under every hot take was the same smug little prediction: the Raiders would be lucky to avoid last.
We didn’t just avoid last. We climbed, we scrapped, we learned, and by the time the dust settled we’d written a season that made those spoon forecasts look like a bad comedy sketch. If you want to know how that happened, don’t start with stats. Start with heartbeat.
This year’s Canberra Raiders were young, raw in places, brave in others. A new captain’s voice where an old one had lived for years. Fresh faces across the park. Not a rebuild so much as a reforge, the old steel heated and hammered with new carbon. The veterans who stayed were the rivets. The kids were the spark. And somehow, across games that yo-yo’d between exhilarating and borderline cardiac, they figured out how to be a team that refuses to lie down.
I’ve seen stubborn before, but this season felt like something purer. It felt like identity.
If you want to understand the soul of this club, stand in your seat when the Viking horn blows. You’ll feel it under your ribs before you hear it in your ears. That first mournful note leaves frost on your skin. Then the drums in the stands begin, hands slapping palms in that thunderous clap, slow at first, then building as the whole thing swells into a single, rolling sound. The Viking Clap is half war cry, half love letter, and every time it starts I think: this is what family sounds like when it calls you home.
That’s the Raiders to me. Not a brand. A family.
We’ve got one-club players who choose roots over glitter, blokes who’d rather grind for green than audition for the next big city deal. We’ve got a coach who lives on the sideline like an NFL general, eyes level with the ruck, feeling the bumps, riding every carry, barking not because he loves the sound of his own voice but because he can smell the hinge where a game swings.
There’s nothing clinical about it. There’s sweat and dust and a little bit of crazy. And it works, because he knows his players the way you know your kids: which ones need a rocket, which ones need a nod.
People ask me where this madness started for me. I’m a Bundaberg girlie, of all places. I was fourteen, a bookish kid who thought footy was background noise grown-ups generated. I took a novel to Suncorp because I didn’t think I’d like the game. The Raiders beat the Broncos that night. I left the stadium with my heart full, my voice gone, and my book unread. One team walked into my life and refused to leave. I’ve been green ever since.
This squad felt new by design and necessity. Fresh halves, emergent edges, baby-faced backs who suddenly had to be men. The old firm held the middle together. There were weeks it clicked so beautifully you wanted to frame the sets and hang them over the couch. There were weeks it didn’t. That’s what finding yourself looks like in pro sport. You don’t get the montage. You get the mess.
We were still arguing with ourselves about what kind of side we wanted to be. First-half bullies? Second-half finishers? A team that could throttle a contest for 80? Some weeks we led early and got reeled in.
Some weeks we came off the ropes in the last twenty like we’d found a secret second lung. I have a theory and I’m sticking to it: if we’re up by more than two at the half, Ricky doesn’t scream enough. The boys relax, the other mob smell just a whiff of permission, and suddenly we’re playing with fire.
But if it’s all square, or we’re behind, or clinging to a two-point edge, the old sideline orchestra tunes up. The message lands. The line tightens. And we come home snarling.
Call it superstition if you want. In my bones, it’s pattern.
Jamal Fogarty. (Photo by Mark Nolan/Getty Images)
Every season has a couple of results that tattoo themselves on the year. Ours came in unlikely places. Mudgee against the Panthers, for one. Not many gave us a prayer. We won it with placement and bloody-mindedness, players putting their bodies into tackles like they’d happily leave them there, brains tuned to the tiny edges where set plays become points. That wasn’t luck. That was homework, hunger, and a refusal to accept the script.
Magic Round against Melbourne was another. The Storm are a measuring stick whether you like it or not. We matched their tempo, then we ate it. I watched us out-think them in spots and out-tough them in others. You could feel it ripple through the fanbase: we aren’t passengers here – we are drivers.
And then there was the moment that still makes my throat tight. Big Josh Papali’i, the old soul of this side, rumbles over not once but twice, then knocks over his own conversion.
The run, the lift, the strike, the grin that could start a bonfire. The coach near tears on the sideline, hands doing that little half-clap he does when the pride overtakes the volume. That was more than points on a board. That was a club’s heart standing up in public.
People throw around the phrase “tough draw” like it’s a detail. It isn’t a detail when you live it. We were everywhere this year. Las Vegas to open the season in a different hemisphere. Cairns sweating through the afternoon.
The Northern Territory glare. Across the ditch again and again against a Warriors outfit that brings a whole country with it. And then back home, where cold and wind make you earn every metre. The Raiders didn’t just travel. We hauled the club’s story all over the map and still turned up with our chin out.
I went to Vegas. Packed the flag, packed my voice, packed that little green stubbornness that says you back your boys in on foreign soil even when the neon is trying to hypnotise you.
Watching my team run out in America felt like introducing an old friend to a new crowd: “This is the Raiders. They’re going to make you feel something you didn’t know you had.” They did.
Tom Starling celebrates with teammates. (Photo by Hannah Peters/Getty Images)
Did we win games we “shouldn’t” have won? Depends whose rulebook you’re using. We won games the spreadsheet set didn’t like because we out-believed and out-committed. We won because young legs chased everything and old heads chose the right moments to throw the cut-out or hold the pass. We won because this club’s default setting is “fight”.
Yes, we dropped games we shouldn’t have too. The Bulldogs still live rent-free in my annoyance. Both times, we had them where we wanted them and did that irritating thing where you let daylight in on a good deed.
My halftime-yelling theory will die on this hill. More than two points up, and we get polite. Less than that, and we get honest.
But across the season the ledger wasn’t just positive; it was emphatic. We knocked off every other top-eight side except the Dogs. We took the minor premiership, and I will not be shamed for celebrating it. People who sniff at trophies in August forget you don’t get to choose when your team’s excellence arrives.
You honour it when it does. A minor premiership is not the ultimate crown, but it is a crown. It says across months of travel, injuries, and chaos, you were the best at the one thing you can control: the long haul.
Finals footy is a blade. It doesn’t just cut; it reveals the grain. We stumbled in the prelims, took the second-chance lifeline, and stumbled again in the semi. Two hits to the same bruise. That’s the kind of pain that sits with you at breakfast. It’s also the kind of pain that seasons a group properly.
We should have been in the big dance. I’ll die saying that. But not because I want to rewrite anything. Because I saw a side with the spine, the steel, and the smarts to belong there. Sometimes belonging doesn’t convert to admission. That’s sport. Cruel and honest in the same breath.
Ethan Strange passes. (Photo by Mark Nolan/Getty Images)
You learn a lot about a club by the way its senior blokes move. Papali’i is my favourite for a hundred reasons. He doesn’t just carry. He gathers the whole shape of a set in his hands and says, “Follow me.” Origin showed what most of us already knew: he’s built for heavy traffic and he doesn’t flinch.
We’ve got one-club hearts sprinkled through the roster, players who treat the jersey like a member of the family, not a costume. That matters when injuries hit, when combinations get shaken, when the kid next to you in the line needs someone to steady the ground. It matters in the way the sheds sound after a tight one. It matters on Tuesday when the lungs hurt and you go again.
And hovering over it, the coach who won Dally M Coach of the Year for exactly the reason his critics sniff: because he coaches at ground level. Not tucked in a box counting sets, not insulated by glass.
He paces the sideline like a man reading the weather. He listens to his forwards breathe. He sees when a centre’s feet have gone quiet and knows the word that will switch them back on. He treats the defensive line like a living thing he can talk into shape. You don’t have to love it. I do. It’s part of why this team feels personal.
Every season leaves you with a handful of logistics that bruise the heart. Jamal Fogarty moving on means we have to choose and groom the next sharpshooter.
Kicking wins you ugly games in winter and beautiful games in September. It’s not optional. So we find the boot. We coach the routine. We build the nerve.
Jarrod Croker’s presence around the club matters in a different way now. He is living proof that loyalty can be a plan, not a fairy tale. Whether he’s on the grass, in a tracksuit, or in a whisper at training, the standard he set doesn’t vanish. That’s culture. You don’t buy it. You inherit it and you add to it.
(Photo by Mark Nolan/Getty Images)
And then there’s Papa, signed on again, the big heartbeat staying a little longer. Every extra year you get with a player like that is compound interest on belief.
Wooden spooners, were we?
Not in any universe I recognise. The talk at the start of the year wasn’t wrong about one thing: we were young and we were unknown. But the idea that this club would meekly shuffle to the bottom of the ladder told me more about the people saying it than about us. The Raiders don’t do meek. We do stubborn. We do inconvenient. We do the result that makes everyone else check their spreadsheets twice.
So yes, I celebrate the minor premiership. I celebrate the travel. I celebrate the nights we stole back from better pedigrees. I celebrate the kids who became men in real time and the men who kept being the sort of men you want kids to copy.
We don’t get to bottle the good bits and pour them out next March. That’s not how sport works. We get an off-season to sharpen what needs sharpening. We get six months to decide our combinations, harden our edges, teach a new boot to love the big moment. We get to decide, finally, if we’re a first-half, second-half, or whole-game team. Here’s my vote: whole game, please. Eighty minutes of sting and smarts. And keep the sideline orchestra tuned. Two-point halftime leads are dangerous around here.
I believe 2026 looks bright because I’ve just watched a year that burned away a lot of nonsense. This group knows who it is. We aren’t tourists in big games anymore. We’re tenants. We pack out the away sheds. We drag our people across oceans and deserts and make new fans in places that don’t yet know why the horn makes them cry.
Kaeo Weekes. (Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
People tell me not to celebrate in August. They say footy will make a fool of you if you count your crowns early. Maybe so. But if you can’t sing when your team sits on top after the long haul, why are you here? This game breaks our hearts for free.
You have to take the joy it offers on the way through. We didn’t get the major premiership this time. We did get proof that we can take a young, rewired, allegedly spoon-bound roster and turn it into the best regular-season side in the comp. That is not nothing. That is a launch pad.
I’m a Raiders fan, true and true. I bled green at 14 at Suncorp and I’ll bleed green when I’m 40 and beyond. I’ve carried a book to a game, thinking I wouldn’t care and left with a club stitched through my chest. I’ve flown across the world to watch them run out under neon.
I’ve stood in cold nights that make your teeth ache and clapped my hands raw with strangers who feel like cousins. I’ve watched the horn turn a stadium into a single animal and thought: this is what belonging feels like.
We’re a family club with a warrior’s face. We don’t chase headlines; we collect scars. We aren’t everyone’s darlings; we are each other’s. And when the next season comes and the sun hits the grass and the horn blows and the clap starts, I’ll be right there with the same ridiculous faith.
Wooden spooners, indeed. Tell that to the kids who learned how to win in Mudgee. Tell it to the big man who scored twice and kicked his own two. Tell it to the coach who paces the touchline like it’s a tightrope and refuses to look down.
Tell it to me. I’ll smile, shake my head, and sing anyway. Because this isn’t a hobby. It’s a vow. And the heart of the Raiders doesn’t just beat. It keeps the rest of us alive.
AshMaree88https://ift.tt/C9iOaSF heart that won’t quit: Why I bleed green even though everyone else expects Raiders to finish last
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