Have the Roosters failed?

Why is something as emotional as sport reduced to something so linear as *checks notes* wins and losses?

Regardless of the sport you follow, seasons are often defined and analysed through the clinical lens of wins and losses and, more broadly, premierships.

Bold take I know, but that’s the takesman in me.

Anyway, the idea of success and failure being defined by winning the ultimate goal is one that is born and peddled via a media cycle that begins in the infancy of the season, when players are simply training the house down in preparation for the year ahead.

The same company line is always trotted out.

“Our goal is the premiership, and anything else isn’t good enough.”

Now obviously any player that willingly says at the start of the season that they’re not aiming for premiership glory is just lying directly to your face, but season definitions when it’s all said and done are far more nuanced and grey than the linear premiership or bust rhetoric provides.

One pillar on which this is built is expectations, and for this let’s look at the Sydney Roosters.

Very few teams build up such a reputation that the mere mention of their name is enough to catapult them into premiership discussions without factoring in anything else. You think the New England Patriots, the Los Angeles Lakers, Manchester United, the Sydney Roosters.

Look at me, I’ve become what I hate, comparing Australian sports teams to some of the biggest global brands. Like the Dally M awards comparing Daly Cherry-Evans to Tom Brady and Michael Jordan.

Anyway, the execution isn’t clean but the point is valid. If you have a problem with it I don’t care.

In hindsight should we have been concerned that the Roosters were replacing a functional hooker in Sam Verrills with a misfit battering ram in Brandon Smith? Yeah probably. And sure, losing Connor Watson before the season to injury was a body blow, but it was always a timeshare at best anyway.

Should we have examined the depth of the roster and realised after the cream at the top it’s a pretty thin wafer? Sure.

Did we do either of those things? No of course not, because is the Sydney Roosters we’re talking about here.

The foreshadowing began early when the Roosters fell in Round 1 to a haphazardly assembled expansion Dolphins team in their first ever bout in NRL history, a team held together by chewing gum, hope and some Wayne Bennett aura.

The Roosters started shakily, for a club of their expectations anyway, with 5 wins and 4 losses through the first 10 rounds of the season causing some pundits to question whether they’d put lipstick on a pig with their preseason predictions of Grand Final winners.

It’s funny how a few weeks can shape or shift an entire narrative. Where the Roosters were the popular pick to challenge the Penrith-South Sydney-Melbourne pre-existing triopoly (yes I made up a word deal with it), a series of stuttering performances during the middle of the season shot any confidence in this team being anything more than “plucky”, a great insult to a proud contending franchise.

A five game period, including two losses against Penrith by a combined 68 points, plus other losses to North Queensland and St George Illawarra, and a one point squeaker over the Bulldogs, had punters of the spiteful anti-Easts persuasion gleefully crowing about a lost season.

“Put a line through them” as the saying goes.

A two point win over Newcastle in Round 16 would only briefly abate the hounds, as losses to Canberra, Manly and Melbourne would soon follow, along with it questions about several bastions of the Roosters.

When things go bad at the top, they go very bad, and no one is spared recrimination and interrogation. Whether it was an examination of Trent Robinson’s methods and selections (including a persistence to keep picking Drew Hutchison at centre over literally anyone else), the curious case of Sam Walker’s dropping pre-knee injury, or the long term status of James Tedesco of all people, the shots from the cheap seats were quick and unrelenting.

Now that’s not to say I or anyone else is feeling sorry for the Roosters going through that tough midseason trough, because I don’t, and nor should you. You shouldn’t feel sorry for the millionaire that has to catch the bus for one day because his Mercedes is getting serviced.

But it is an interesting case study about where the line is drawn and what defines a successful season.

The Roosters, following that 32-10 humbling to Brisbane at the Gabba of all places in Round 22, rattled off five straight wins to come charging into the finals in 7th position, including a marketer’s dream matchup of a win-and-in Round 27 faceoff against the old enemy in South Sydney.

That alone was probably enough to make the most ardent Roosters fan write off the rest of the year and give the stamp of approval, making the finals at the expense of your fiercest rival.

And yet, despite the repeated shitmixings the Roosters were subjected to, they did enough to not only recover to make the finals, but they won their elimination bout against the Sharks in front of 17 people at a stadium one spilt beer away from being shut down by the CFMEU.

Jokes aside, the Roosters season is one to challenge the traditional measuring stick of “if you ain’t first you’re last.”

Were they the victim of unrealistic expectation due to their name and a couple of key signings? Maybe, but that’s easy to say in hindsight. No one expects injuries to mount to the extent they did in Bondi, and you can’t prepare for having to use 30 players over the course of a first grade season.

Will the Roosters consider this season a failure due to not winning the title? I’m sure publicly there’ll be all the right sentiment pushed forward about how the year wasn’t good enough and injuries are no excuse, and there were certainly things that everyone could do differently, but behind closed doors a Week 2 finals exit and vanquishing the Rabbitohs to the pits of Mad Monday before spring has truly sprung is enough to get any red white and blue smirk widened.

Even after all that, they were still two seconds and one Will Warbrick fingernail away from beating Melbourne in Melbourne and playing a prelim against the Panthers in the cozy confines of a reverberating (because it won’t be full) Accor Stadium.

Sometimes, them’s the breaks. If sport never hurts you then you’re not caring hard enough.

The Roosters absolutely had the talent to make a better fist of the year than what they did. Sure they were unlucky at times with injuries, but this was also a team running on the fumes of years gone past, on name over tangible production, a lack of cohesion mashed together by some individual brilliance to get by.

And yet, amidst all the despair (as much despair as finishing 7th and winning a finals game can cause), the Roosters have still managed to pick through the debris and uncover some talent. Terrell May really kicked on later in the year to be one of the best impact props off the bench in the competition, Junior Pauga proved himself to be more than serviceable outside back depth in a crisis, Billy Smith finally put together an injury free campaign and showed some nice skills in the centres, while I thought both Butcher brothers really took steps forward this year.

Dom Young and Spencer Leniu headline an incoming class of 2024. A glamour winger and a firebrand front rower looking for a bigger role. Both big name players in their own right, Young one of the best wingers in the competition, Leniu a potential three-time premiership winner before the age of 24.

But are they signings to take the Roosters team we’ve just seen over the top?

If history has shown us anything, we’ll blindly believe they are, and we’ll do this all over again next year.

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A FAVOUR TO ASK

With Twitter sucking the proverbial right now, it’s getting harder to get these articles out there and seen outside of the circles I already travel in. If you do enjoy these and know someone else who might, please consider passing it along.

Over 200 of you read this shambles of a newsletter, a number I thought would be impossible to reach this season as a random on the internet nattering about footy, so the support is truly appreciated and humbling.

Let’s finish the year off strong.