CANBERRA – Mark Nawaqanitawase was meant to ease back in. That was the plan, anyway. The Sydney Roosters winger had been sidelined since Round 9 following syndesmosis surgery — an operation that required nine weeks of careful rehabilitation — and Trent Robinson was cautious enough to list him in the extended 21 rather than name him in the starting 17 heading into Friday night’s game against the Canberra Raiders at GIO Stadium.
By the 10th minute, he had already scored his first try.
By full-time, the Raiders had been blanked 26-0 in the worst home defeat of their 2026 campaign. Nawaqanitawase finished with three tries, 188 run metres, and six tackle breaks — the sort of returning-hero performance that makes opposition coaches wonder what they did to deserve it. For a Roosters side that had scored only four points in its previous two games, the result was less a win than a reset.
The match had been billed as a genuine contest. The Raiders came in off an impressive 26-12 dismantling of the North Queensland Cowboys a week earlier — their most complete performance of the season, built on Origin energy from five-eighth Ethan Strange and relentless defence up the middle. Canberra had beaten Sydney four times in their last five meetings. Ricky Stuart’s team had won the territory and the possession battle in almost every loss this year.
None of it mattered on Friday night.
The first score arrived when centre Robert Toia — who would finish the night with three try assists — split the line and found Nawaqanitawase with a short pass on the left edge. The winger rode a attempted ankle tap and grounded low in the corner. Sam Walker converted. The game, as a contest, was over by the 34th minute, when Reece Robson drove over from dummy-half to make it 22-0 at the break — the hooker’s try coming in his 150th NRL appearance.
Hugo Savala scored the second try in the 24th minute after Walker and Toia combined on the short side. Nawaqanitawase made it three just before the half-hour mark, running a hard line off Toia’s inside ball, and Walker converted both. The Raiders produced 14 errors on the night and halfback Ethan Sanders missed nine tackles — a combination that gave the Roosters a field day in field position. Canberra managed one linebreak for the entire match.
Nawaqanitawase crossed for his third in the 48th minute, his second try in the second half, finishing a movement that began from a Toia linebreak on halfway. He ended the night with more tackle breaks (six) than the entire Raiders backline.
For Robinson, the performance raised a question that is more awkward than it sounds: why did it take a blank week and a returning star for the Roosters to play to their capabilities? The defeat to Melbourne the previous week had been described as the club’s worst defensive display of the year — 18 errors, an incompletion rate that embarrassed the coaching staff, Sam Walker looking well below his representative form. Robinson made no changes for Canberra. The same 17. Either he believed in the group or he had no better options. Friday night, at least, suggested the former was correct.
Walker finished with six points, three conversions, and two linebreak assists. James Tedesco made 19 runs and broke five tackles. But the throughline of every Roosters attacking moment was Toia at centre — a player who rarely appears in the weekly highlight packages but who has become the connective tissue of this backline. His three try assists were not accidents; they were the product of a player reading the Raiders’ defensive line faster than anyone else on the field.
The result came on a night when the competition received a sobering reminder of what it has lost. Melbourne Storm confirmed shortly after their 32-30 win over the Newcastle Knights at AAMI Park that Xavier Coates had ruptured his Achilles at training on Friday, ruling him out for the rest of the season and requiring surgery next week. It was his second serious Achilles injury in 2026. Coates was “only running at about 50 per cent,” the 25-year-old told AAP, “and it just went.” The Storm, already sitting outside the top eight with six wins from 14 games, will now face the rest of their season without the winger who bagged 20 tries for them in 2025. The implications for Queensland’s State of Origin programme — and Australia’s end-of-year World Cup campaign — are significant. As the Ponga send-off controversy from Game I illustrated earlier this month, Queensland’s representative depth is already under scrutiny. Losing Coates to a second serious injury in the same year makes the selection picture considerably harder.
For the Raiders, Friday night exposed a vulnerability that the Cowboys result had temporarily masked. The halves pairing of Strange and Ethan Sanders — one of the brightest young partnerships in the competition — was overrun from the first tackle set. Strange committed three errors. Sanders missed nine tackles. Neither is a reason to panic about the direction of Ricky Stuart’s rebuild, but GIO Stadium felt very different at full-time from the way it had felt seven days earlier. Canberra’s season still sits on 10 points from 14 games — level with the Roosters and within range of the top eight — but their path to finals football requires a level of consistency they have yet to sustain for more than two consecutive rounds.
Whether Robinson has solved anything structural with this performance, or whether the Roosters simply needed Nawaqanitawase at wide-runner, remains the unanswered question heading into Round 15. The winger barely needed 80 minutes to answer his own. The defence is still the programme’s central concern, and no opponent as dangerous as the Panthers or Storm is scheduled this fortnight. Robinson will know, more than anyone, that what looks like a corner turned on a Friday night in Canberra is not always the same thing by Saturday in Sydney.
