It has been another season from hell for the Wests Tigers. And it’s not over yet.
Benji Marshall’s men have lost their last eight matches on the trot, but there are still three rounds left – and now they have lost their premier halfback, Adam Doueihi, to shoulder surgery.
Doueihi returned in round 17 after injuring his shoulder scoring a try against Cronulla in round nine, but has been playing in pain ever since.
“New scans on Adam’s shoulder have shown the time has come to have his reconstruction done,” Tigers head of high-performance Peter Moussa said. “This gives him enough time to be ready for the start of the 2027 season.”
The Roosters piled on 82 points against North Queensland a few weeks back, which makes you fear a similar scoreline could be on the cards against a Tigers side desperately out of form. Could we see our first 100-point rugby league game?
We asked Roosters star Sam Walker about the possibility of a team bringing up the ton, but he had his doubts due to the amount of time lost through goal kicks.
“It would be extremely difficult for a team to be ‘on’ that long, and it was impressive for us to stay in that game [against the Cowboys] as long as we did,” Walker said.
“We touched on it after that game how we could have made it a pretty ugly game, and it ended up 64-20, or something like that, but was stayed hungry, and wanted to be at our best.”
The Tigers head to Townsville the following week to take on a Cowboys side fresh off the bye and desperate for a win to secure their finals spot.
Then the Penrith Panthers await in the last round. Coach Ivan Cleary has rested some of his big guns before the finals in recent years, but if the Panthers have not locked in a top-two finish then Cleary may be forced to go all out.
Had Doueihi not been whisked away for surgery and Fainu broken down, one of the big talking points this week would have been whether Marshall should have dropped Parramatta-bound captain Jarome Luai in favour of Andrews.
Luai was the first to put his hand up for a missed tackle on Moses Suli in the loss to St George Illawarra on the weekend, telling reporters afterwards: “Nothing to be proud of when you dish things up like that.
“I think I had another one that led to a line break. But I’m here, and I’m never going to give up.”
The Tigers started the season with five wins from their opening seven games. But after Luai announced he had become the PNG Chiefs’ first signing, following a hit-and-run trip to Port Moresby via a private jet bankrolled by the local government, they lost 12 of their next 14.
Luai is a champion player but seriously needs a change of scenery. Throwing a kid like Andrews in for the final three games against quality opposition would have been crazy and ruined his confidence.
The Tigers have conceded 613 points this year. Based on their own rotten form and the strength of their next three opponents, they could easily finish up with a tally higher than the atrocious 750 they conceded in 2024. They have given up 40 points or more at least five times this year.
The last-placed Dragons have a stack of recruits for 2027, which gives the Red V faithful hope. As bad as the Broncos have been, just one place off the bottom, they still have some of the best players in the competition on the payroll, which gives their own giant supporter base reason for optimism next year.
But what about the Tigers? Who do they have coming to the rescue next year?
Marshall was dynamite on the field, and will need to be just as inspirational to lift the spirits of his players over the summer.
It has been a bad year. Sadly, it looks set to get even worse.
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