Most of us will forever love Rosco. However, while difficult and precarious at times, it was pretty pleasing to enter the Optus Stadium safari park Sunday and take down a big game Lyon. Time to Restump Podcast the successful hunting expedition.

It is still both traumatic and reassuring to revisit our previous encounter against Rosco and his Saintly pride. While we were largely our own worst enemy on the day, they brutally ripped us to shreds in what was an unwatchable massacre. However, fast forward eight weeks and we righted the wrongs and made amends.

Do the subsequent positives, including the retributive win yesterday, outweigh the negatives of that fateful day eight weeks ago? Did we need the mindset realignment mauling? We'll never know but going into yesterday, I'm not sure we'd have been on the end of a five-game winning streak had we not suffered that troubling experience. The great man did take us to a grand final… did our former coach inadvertently do us another favour?

In or beyond the football world everyone at some stage in their lives has to take their beneficial beating. Our core group took theirs eight weeks back. It was a humiliating and embarrassing belting on the big stage that put the climactic cap on some catastrophic form. 

The depths of despair are often where the healing begins and change is born, but it takes some sort of catalytic event to arrive at the arena of realisation. It’s evident by the reported hard spoken truths, the subsequent soul searching and the carrying of energising scars since, that the previous Saints game was our season defining moment of mortality. Yesterday’s performance only put an exclamation point on it.

The team we were eight weeks back to the team we have been since is unrecognisable. We’re not in the top echelon yet, but we’re a different unit, a more psychologically pro-active collective exuding energised initiative. We’re now a group of personal responsibility taking, team-oriented and driven individuals. 

We've now arrived at the end of the rare period in which we made hay while the home ground sun shone. In a recent era, within this season, the thought of vital wins would have rendered us jittery, robbing us of maximising the benefit from the advantageous run of home ground games. But while it has been a great yield, the harvest is far from complete. 

While our hopes of hitting back and securing 4 points of retribution were realised, the victory was more important for bigger fish to fry reasons.  We’re sitting in 6th but we’ve got three teams breathing down our necks, Gold Coast have a game in hand and we’re all but occupying the equal lowest percentage of the top 9 teams. Clearly there is still plenty of work to be done, but you get the feeling we're up for the challenge.

Time for a further chat about the actual game on the pod in more depth... thankfully not the despair level depth! So, for whatever reason, if your ears have recently done you wrong and you’re looking for revenge on them, our nonsensical purple noise is a fitting retributive punishment.

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