The grass was green, but I felt each tackle. You could see that the bodies hit the ground hard, enough to raise dust. The drought has hardened the oval which usually has muddy patches by now. 

The wives watching from the cars around the ground had increasingly anxious expressions, and the girls on the benches had stopped calling to their boyfriends and were fidgeting in silence. The young boys playing around the edges had long ago turned to their own games (just playing a little rougher than usual it seemed to me). It wasn't going well for the Tigers.

I don't know what the final score was, but the Visitors were 22 points with the home team still to score when I left. I made a remark to the (about my age) man who was putting up the scores, that "it didn't look like an even match" and he shook his head and growled back, "I'd bloody do something about it if they'd only let me play". 

I could tell that the post mortem in the pub after the match won't be kind. 

(Not being an avid follower of local Rugby League I'd never heard of Boomanulla. The Whitepages Postcode Search doesn't recognise it as a place so a turning to a web search I found a handful of references to the Narrabundah based Bogong "Warriors" who in 1989 were renamed the Boomanulla Warriors but these guys were clearly called Raiders.)