And so to Remondis Stadium, “Sweet home, Remondis” as it’s known by very few if any people, for the NRL’s Battle for Little Big Spoon: Cronulla Sharks and Canberra Raiders. Should be a good one.

Actually it should be rubbish. The home team Sharks are without a host of players due to injury and the Asada malarkey while the Raiders are pretty much hopeless. Well, they’re not hopeless. There’s hope, for they have hot kids and big thunderers, and a training facility that leeches nous from the Australian Institute of Sport.

But they’re having a flat-out hideous season, this year, which pains me to see for I have allegiance to the Green Machine, having sung the team’s theme song many times in September of 1989 after the club won its first premiership in the greatest grand final there’s ever been and Ricky Stuart danced a sexy jig on the dance floor of Illusions, the discotheque in the middle of Raiders Leagues Club, Mawson. Good, even great times.

This year? Not so much. Indeed the club is undergoing arguably, probably, without question its worst season since inception in 1982. Equal last with a bullet, a busted squadron of kids and journeymen, travelling worse than milk in the car on a road trip through Hell. Maybe not that bad. But pretty bad.

Yet the Sharks are travelling worse. Ravaged by injury, the ructions of the secret agents of Asada, and a bunch of other very “rugby league” malarkey involving camera phones and bodily fluids and road rage, and who knows what else, it would take the game’s Eighth Immortal Andrew Johns being outed as a gun-trafficker for Al Qaida before you’d be surprised by anything rugby league dishes up.

Fans watch the action unfold. Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images

Example? Said secret agents of Asada are here at Remondis because they have a sense of humour or theatre or both. Or perhaps it’s their job. Either way, news photographers chase them, “pap them”, as they say, what paparazzi do, and one of the agents puts a clipboard in front of his face and so looks guilty of something. Yet he should not. Asada are public servants charged with making sure sport is clean and no-one is cheating. Cronulla ran a systematic blood-doping operation. That bears scrutinising. Fans don’t like it because the drama’s gone on longer than winter in Norway. But, well, you know. Tough shit.

Lovely day! About 20C in what Sydney laughably calls “winter”. Canberra people and Norwegians know winter. Canberra can be as cold as a length of blue steel wedged in the polar ice cap. In summer it’s as hot as hell. They put the parliament house of Australia in Canberra because it was in between Melbourne to Sydney and they couldn’t decide what city should be capital. Crazy nation builders.

Remondis? A fine, purpose-built suburban stadium once known as Endeavour Field (after the boat from 1770 that James Cook bumped into the great southern land mass) and after that Caltex Field, Ronson Oval, Shark Park, Toyota Park and Toyota Stadium. There’s a chunk of grassy hill upon which many children frolic. There’s a Peter Burns Stand that’s effectively the front half of Cronulla-Sutherland Leagues Club turned into a viewing platform.

The stereotypes would have Sharks fans as, “Waxheads”, stiff-haired and salty, beach people, “Australians”. Like any stereotype, not the full story, but not entirely untrue.

Raiders fans, meanwhile, would be cast as public servants. The stereotype would see them as bookish, grey, accountants, nerdos. But consider: James Bond is a public servant. And James Bond has a licence to kill. James Bond is a bad motherflipper, a stone killer, especially early on when Sean Connery was coldly knocking off Soviet goons. Sean Connery killed more than malaria.

A (very brief) glimpse of the Sharks’ changing rooms. Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images

What? The game? Worst spectacle since Clive Palmer doing that shaky thing with his giant buttocks. Twerking. Worst game since the Bulldogs and Newtown went 0-0 in the bog of Henson Park in 1982. Quite possibly the worse game ever. Worst. Game. Ever.

No it’s not. But my, quite a lot of dropped ball and various badness. So bad is it that Canberra’s play-maker Josh McCrone, after kicking the ball out on the full and passing the ball at team-mates’ heads three times, is hooked off the very field by coach Stuart.

For half-an-hour people are wondering will anyone score. A man in the crowd yells: “Field goal!” But the Sharks don’t listen, and score a try. Which is nice. And at half-time it’s 6-blot.

After the break McCrone is back in another position, hooker-dummy-half, and, chastened, he sparks the Raiders into top action. He leaps out of dummy-half, runs tight and probing lines, and feeds his speed men wide. It would be described as astute coaching if the coach were anyone but Stuart. As a player, Stuart could fling a wombat across Queanbeyan. The old leather Steeden rugby league ball was rounder and heavier than the all-weather goose-bump-dimpled footy of today, yet Stuart could control it like a rhythmic gymnast with one of those long streamer things. Top player.

Edrick Lee of the Raiders dives for the corner. Photograph: Mark Kolbe/Getty Images Photograph: Mark Kolbe/Getty Images

But as a coach he’s more maligned than airborne Ebola. His premiership and three straight grand finals with the Roosters are devalued by talkback gibberers because of the contributions of Brad Fittler and Phil Gould. He also couldn’t win a series for NSW against perhaps the greatest Queensland Origin team – arguably team, period – that rugby league’s ever seen. And as coach of Australia he lost the odd one to New Zealand, the sporting equivalent of the United States Dream Team getting bumped off by Mexico. Not sure if that’s exactly right, but I’m running with it. Tough shit.

Anyway, Stuart moves McCrone to hooker. Jarrod Croker runs free like the buffalo. Hot-footed pants man Anthony Milford pronks about and bags a double. And 21-year-old Mitch Cornish gives us a preview of Things To Come with a composed display of tactical chicanery.

And after 80 minutes Sharks People would do well to forget, it’s Raiders 22 defeating Sharks 12 in front of … ha. What? Oh please. Official crowd: 13,964, a number in keeping with the rigorous accounting standards of some of our politician friends mentioned in the Icac.

And so kids and dads kick footies on the green grass for a half-hour or so, until a line of yellow-clad security men form a line on halfway, and walk slowly up-field, shepherding The People from the grass. Some kids make a dash for it through the middle and make it given this is the same mob of crack security goons who watched a nude and greased-up Wati Holmwood run fully 150 metres onto ANZ Stadium, his blubber flapping about like Homer Simpson in slow-motion, interrupting the very play of State of Origin. Indeed so large a presence was Holmwood and the pack of puffer-jacketed security men who eventually mobbed him, that grizzled warrior and Blues second-rower, Ryan Hoffman, knowing his team was under the pump, feigned falling over so that referees might deem Holmwood’s interjection an obstruction. That’s thinking on your feet, right there.

Anyway.

The end.