Bill Murray wakes up, the clock flips over, Sonny and Cher start up, and the poor bloke lives the same day all over again. Welcome to a year at Eric Tweedale.

Not the losing, mind. The nearly. Week after week they came off the park having been within a converted try of a result, the car horns went quiet a few minutes too early, and everyone drove home to do it again next Saturday. Same script, different jumper.

Finish eighth and most people file you under about right. The Two Blues were nowhere near about right. They were a handful of bounces from September, and they have the paperwork to prove it.

Same Saturday, different jumper

Start with the number that ought to be framed and hung above the bar: nineteen bonus points. More than any other club in the competition. More than the Beasties, who took the minor premiership. More than the Rats. Nobody in the Shute Shield spent more afternoons within touching distance of a result.

Here is how a number like that happens. Eight of their eighteen games were decided by five points or fewer, and the Two Blues went three and five in them. Three down to Gordon in Round 1. Three down to Norths in Round 10. Two down to Manly. Five down to the Woods. The other way: three up on Eastwood away, two up on Hunter, and a single solitary point up on the Wildfires in the final round.

The pick of them came out at Holroyd in Round 15, where the car park leans on the horn every time the Two Blues cross. The Beasties arrived as the best side in the competition. Mesu Dolokoto went over to level it and the horns went off. Rodney Iona nudged the Two Blues in front with a penalty. Then Mick Icely crossed off an Easts maul with four minutes left and the whole thing evaporated. Two points. Game of the Round, and the eventual minor premiers got out of the west with their ears ringing.

A ninth game, against the Wicks in Round 5, was a one-point affair until the last play, when a Two Blues knock-on let Alex Molloy scoop up and race away. Flip three of these and we are writing an entirely different review.

He learned the piano

Sailosi Tagicakibau moved upstairs over the summer, taking the Director of Rugby role while keeping both hands on the attack and the game model, with Travis Church running first grade and the set piece. After a 2025 he described as the most disappointing of his time at the club, he made a promise: “We’re going to play an attacking brand of rugby.”

Say what you like about where they finished, the man delivered. Seventy-two tries. A backline the match reports kept running out of adjectives for. A counter-attacking streak that turned every loose ball in Sydney into a five-pointer waiting to happen. And all of it done on forty-seven per cent of the ball and forty-seven per cent of the territory, which is to say less of both than almost anybody.

Here is the loveliest part. Not one Two Blues player finished inside the competition’s top ten try-scorers. Seventy-two tries and not a single hog among them.

Here come the hotsteppers

Manasa Mataele was the belle of the ball, never more so than at Chatswood in Round 11, where he helped himself to a hat-trick in a losing side. Christian Papa spent the back half of the year making good defenders look silly, with doubles against Souths and the Wicks in consecutive weeks. Latrell Smiler Ah-Kiong bagged three of his own against the Rats in Round 9. Rilloy Suesue played the house down at nine, with Rodney Ioana handling the tee.

And a word for Meli Sifa. In Round 11 the prop collected a loose Gordon overthrow on halfway, broke the first tackle, skipped past the second, dummied the third and was finally hauled down fifteen metres out. Props in space remain the great unearned gift of this competition.

I got you, babe

If you want the whole season in eighty minutes, go to Chatswood for Round 11, yes I know, this game features a lot. SUE ME, she was a goody. The Two Blues were three tries up inside the opening quarter, playing some of the best football anyone produced all year. Liam Lord off an overthrow. Mesu Dolokoto. Mataele stepping inside four Stags. Sifa doing a passable impression of a centre. Gordon looked genuinely stunned.

Then the alarm clock went off. A Gordon prop levelled things, Oli Arcus did something close to unlawful to six defenders, Arcus went again, Spinks helped himself, and the Two Blues walked off beaten by eleven having led by three tries.

Same song. Same hour. Same drive home.

Breaking the loop

So what actually needs fixing out west? Not the attack. Not the character either - a side that gets flogged by the Students and the Rats and then takes the eventual minor premiers to the wire a few months later has plenty of that. The repair job is a handful of moments long, and it sits in the last ten minutes of eight different Saturdays.

And somebody is noticing, because the rest of rugby has started shopping at Eric Tweedale. Latrell Smiler Ah-Kiong has gone up to the Waratahs and started their Super Rugby AUS campaign for a side that went all the way to the grand final. He had already been into a Manu Samoa camp alongside Two Blues prop Kaynan Siteine-Tua. Blokes are turning up to this club and leaving it better players.

The rest is in the shed. Iona and Lord were shrewd pickups, and Papa and Mataele are the sort of strike most clubs would remortgage the clubhouse for. Teach this group to win the moments that matter and those eight coin flips start landing the other way up.

Murray got out of the loop in the end. Took him a while, mind. And he had to get a few things right first.