Wests Tigers have had the season from hell. It’s about to get even worse

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 now lost their premier halfback, Adam Doueihi, to a 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.”

To make matters worse, back-up playmaker Latu Fainu was due to return from suspension, only to injure his hamstring – again.

On Sunday, the Tigers take on competition leaders the Sydney Roosters at Allianz Stadium. Hopefully the traffic expected for the Swans match next door at the Sydney Cricket Ground will be enough to convince the Tigers fans to give it a miss.

Plenty of them did not bother last weekend, when less than 10,000 turned up to watch the loss to cellar-dwellers St George Illawarra.

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 rookie playmaker Javon Andrews.