Home finals and the final spot in the top eight are still on the line this weekend but the most anticipated match of the round is the Spoon Bowl between the 16th-placed Eels and the 17th-placed Wests Tigers.
They will come to Campbelltown from far and wide on Friday night to watch two struggling teams do their best to clear that lowest of bars — not finishing last.
Losing, though? Everybody knows about losing. It's the one thing all teams have done before and will do again. It might be for a season, or a month or just one game but losing is the one compulsory sensation in this sport, the only thing all of us understand. At the end of the session, there's a mighty cheer when it's announced that Tony Sukkar will be the club's 12th debutant this season and their 38th player overall.
Api Koroisau readily admits it'll be the biggest game he's played for the club since joining from Penrith. The Tigers' progress is not on the line on Friday. Koroisau says he has seen improvement this year, even if the results don't show it yet."We have hurt ourselves a lot but the ability to be there at the back end of games, to not stop fighting — we've had some blowouts, but the majority of games have been close come to back end.
"Sometimes when you get into the NRL system you can play a certain style too much but right now we have these young guys who can just do a lot.Galvin has been the NRL's star youngster this year and the 19-year-old would be a unanimous choice for rookie of the year were it not for a suspension he copped earlier this season.
When you're fresh 19, every pay cheque's still a fortune, every meal's a feast and every dream can still come true. The Eels aren't as comfortable at this depth. This is a team that was in the grand final just two years ago and their presence in the Spoon Bowl is more surprising. They're talking about it, but not as much.
It's meant that players who weren't even on the first-grade radar at the beginning of the year have been thrust into action. In Moses, Dylan Brown, Clint Gutherson and the incoming Zac Lomax they have a core of star players and need to fill in the spaces between them. Conceding 40 points in an unusual way to win — Moretti said he couldn't have shown his face for a month if they'd lost while Lane compared the Dragons' late run of five tries in 11 minutes to an out-of-body experience — but it's still a win they're proud of.
"It'd be easy for us to play the victim and come up for excuses why we're not playing well, there's a lot of outs. But we want to take responsibility for what we can.""Everyone knows about it , there's so much pride and history in this jersey and we don't want to let it down, or our families, or the fans — they've been in it as much as we have."
They'll be playing for a future not everyone on the roster will survive to see and for the promise of better times ahead, when they don't have to wait until the last game of the season to save themselves from propping up the rest of the ladder.
Rugby League Wests Tigers Parramatta Eels Spoon Bowl
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