No rugby league team has ever started a season in the NRL era worse than the wooden spoon-bound St George Illawarra Dragons, with the club’s 0–9 record now formalised in the annals of footy history. That dates all the way back to 1998, with the team only the third ever to start winless through nine attempts.
Before this hapless Red V side coughed up some of the most putrid football we’ve seen in the NRL, the Newcastle Knights (in 2005) and the South Sydney Rabbitohs (in 2006) struggled just as badly.
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Through the first nine matches of the season (and ten rounds; the Dragons had the bye last week), the team has conceded 309 points, including 106 in the last two outings, against the Roosters and the Knights. They hold a for and against of -185, and are a full two wins behind the next closest teams, the Melbourne Storm and Gold Coast Titans.
Those ’05 Knights conceded 308 points in nine, with a -180 for/against, while the ’06 Rabbitohs gave away 304 points and had a -150 for/against after their first nine matches. The Dragons have ticked along at 34.3 points conceded per game.
That includes a losing margin through the first nine matches that clears 20 points in each and every loss.
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The fear among Dragons faithful in Illawarra and the St George area is that the team could well become the worst rugby league team in the NRL ever. That ignomious group includes the 2016 Newcastle Knights, 2001 Penrith Panthers, and 1999 Western Suburbs Magpies, the last of which is widely agreed to be the worst team ever since 1998.
That Magpies team conceded 944 points in 1999 at 39.3 per game, and lost by a margin of ~27.5 points per game.
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Nothing looked good for the Dragons on Saturday, either, with the home team loudly booed after they conceded 32 unanswered points in the first half. Things improved slightly, 12-10 against them in the second, but the damage was already well done. It also marks 13 straight losses for the Dragons; the equal fourth-longest losing streak in the NRL era.
“It’s like a training run,” Luke Keary said at one point on Fox League during the match.
