By Malcolm Knox
Now all that mid-season flim-flam is over, rugby league fans can knuckle down to the serious business of cheering for whichever team offends them least.
Fans of powerhouse clubs Souths, Manly, the Roosters and Newcastle must start thinking about rugby league as a variant of Senate voting. It's all about your second preference. But choose wisely, or you might find you've replaced Glenn Lazarus in your fantasy front row with Pauline Hanson.
How the mighty have fallen. And how the fallen are mighty. What about those Sharkies, eh? Two years ago, while Manly, Souths and the Roosters topped the ladder, the Sharks were enduring a literally pointless midwinter.
Supercoach Shane Flanagan was serving a ban for his failure to stop Stephen Dank using his players as pincushions. Sponsors were leaving, board directors were given the heave-ho, and Cronulla could only dream of being as well-run as, say, Parramatta.
Illustration: Simon Letch
This was no aberration, but a continuance of the curse that hung over rugby league's least successful club. For 50 years Cronulla have suffered famines, floods and plagues of locusts. They had lost their two grand finals, both to Manly – one amid the kind of all-in brawling that makes a mockery of today's tough guys (that's you, Andrew Fifita: the moment of madness wasn't running across the field to start a fight, it was slapping Gavin Cooper with your handbag when you got there); and the second after a draw and a replay.
In 1997 they lost the Super League grand final too, so they couldn't even boast a Mickey Mouse premiership. How could anyone have had any sympathy for Cronulla? The perennial basket case, bailed out by the league year after year, they fell into Rupert Murdoch's arms at the first asking. No treachery was more pathetic.
Historically, the only palatable Shark was battered flake or Greg Norman.
Cronulla supporters were like those creatures of the deep: you knew they were out there, you just never saw them. You might have met Sharks fans in your life, but few had ever owned up to it.
Second preference: The Sharks' Mitch Brown scores against Penrith last week. The Sharks are a complete rugby league team with style and personality.Credit: Getty Images
But this year, the Sharks are indisputably the magic team who, through a series of miracle plays, last-minute wins, preposterous bounces and the Hand of Bunker, seem to be wearing the gold halo of destiny. Out of the swamps emerge the black-white-and-blue beanies, with long hair and beards attached. Up, Up Cronulla, the Shire sings, as if the deal is already done. They should know better.
As a second-favourite team, the Sharks are easy to support. Look at their main competition. Melbourne are as professional as ever, and Craig Bellamy surely deserves some kind of alchemist's wizard hat. Cheyse Blair, for instance, was known as Chaise Longue for the impact he had at Parramatta and Manly. In Bellamy's hands, he has become a useful first-grader with sustainable delusions of adequacy. No higher praise can be given to a coach. Melbourne might have built their team on a foundation of fraud, but Bellamy has turned so many sows' ears into silk purses, he probably deserves more than his solitary 2012 premiership. Yet Melbourne have as much romance about them as a tax audit.
Easier to admire than love.
North Queensland, who had the freaky-magic touch last year, shed their battler/bridesmaid tag by virtue of their 2015 premiership and a future stadium that will be worth more than 10 Shark Parks. The Cowboys are a star-studded glamour team, therefore a lot less supportable than they were.
The Bulldogs, under Des Hasler, are less a rugby league team than a complicated piece of earthmoving equipment. When the gears are engaged and the nose is pointed forward, they look like they could only be stopped by an equal and opposite force. But the only reason for a neutral to support Canterbury is to see what happens when they have a Sunday final and Will Hopoate has to face the dyslexic's existential dilemma: Who do you believe in, God or Dog? As tantalising as that may be, it's not enough for a rational second preference.
The Broncos are going through the traditional pre-finals funk of Wayne Bennett teams. Whether it's the over-training theory or a cunning plan to fly under the radar, we're not buying it. Brisbane, with their insufferable sense of entitlement, cannot lure anyone into a preference deal.
Among the scramblers for bottom half of the top eight, you have to admire the toil of the Titans, the wackiness of the Warriors and the pluck of the Panthers, but the one team that challenges the Sharks as sentimental pick are Ricky's Raiders. If you tire of the Raiders, you tire of life.
Made up year after year of Queanbeyan juniors and imports who have fallen off the back of a truck, the Raiders always play an enterprising, unconventional, commonsense-defying, lovable brand of football. Coaches are said to mould their clubs, but Canberra has remoulded Ricky Stuart from the uptight control freak of his former years into a hoarse sideline yokel who didn't even see Jordan Rapana's winning try two weeks ago because he was lining up for a drink.
I wish more clubs played like Canberra, and my dream grand final is Sharks-Raiders. (Or no: the dream would be Sharks-Eels, but Parramatta in the grand final is about as believable as salary-cap cheating, drug convictions, walkouts, domestic violence charges, rehab clinics and Jarryd Hayne all crossing paths with one club in one season.)
It would be a hard heart that is unmoved by the 2016 Sharks. Paul Gallen, a shot at glory after years of defeat that would have sapped the spirit of weaker men. Michael Ennis, Luke Lewis and Chris Heighington, playing their best football in their dotage. Fifita and one career-long moment of madness starting at the hairdresser's. Wade Graham and Jack Bird, risk-takers. James "Best While Fresh" Maloney, doing what he did for the Warriors and Roosters, bringing skill and leadership to a new club.
And those free-running greyhounds out wide: Sosaia Feki, Valentine Holmes, Ben Barba. This is a complete rugby league team with style and personality befitting your second preference. And surely, if any club deserves a premiership based on 50 years of pain, penury, misfortune, mismanagement, a truly nightmarish-looking mascot and a really cold home ground on Monday nights, it is this one. Up, Up, Cronulla.