Canberra Raiders captain Jarrod Croker looks to avoid NRL career-long try drought

Back to 2010, when the club's leading point scorer had blonde tips poking through his trademark headgear. That's how long it has been since Croker went eight NRL games without a four-pointer.

Now Croker is desperate to avoid equalling the longest try-scoring drought of his 263-game career when Canberra meet the Parramatta Eels at Western Sydney Stadium on Saturday.

The Raiders centre scored the last of his 127 career tries in last year's preliminary final. You have to wind back to rounds 13 to 20 in 2010 for the last time he went eight matches without one.

Croker looked certain to have ended the drought last weekend but he was denied by the bunker to force the Raiders back to the drawing board in search of a way to reignite their attack - something the Green Machine believe can be an easy fix.

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"That's just the way it was going for us on the weekend," Croker said.

"It would be nice to get over, I haven't scored this year, been a bit of a random drought for me. It would be nice to get one this weekend.

"We did video and had a look at a couple of little areas [we could fix], but we also had about five opportunities that we blew.

"We nail one of them, if I had scored that try, [Jordan Rapana] had one or two in the corner, there's three tries that nine times out of 10 we probably score.

"Then we're probably not talking about it. There's a couple of little areas we definitely need to work on, but if we take our opportunities then it's a different story.

"If we just nail one of them then the momentum might just keep rolling and you get that snowball effect that we see so often in games now.

"With teams on the back foot, with the six again and the fast play the balls, you get that little bit of momentum and put quick tries on."

A clash with the ladder-leading Eels marks Canberra's fifth consecutive week on the road before returning home for round eight.

Croker says there is no danger of the Raiders buckling under a heavy travel toll as they meet the side he dubs "the benchmark" alongside the Sydney Roosters.

"If we can't get up for this, we won't be able to get up at all," Croker said.

"It's a massive challenge, obviously we're on the back foot after a loss. We've gone win-loss-win-loss and been a little bit inconsistent. We need to get back into that consistency, and we're taking on the competition leaders.

"If we can do that, play well, there'll be a little light at the end of the tunnel with a home game coming up the week after. If we can string that together, we won't be short of energy the week after."

NRL ROUND SEVEN

Saturday: Canberra Raiders v Parramatta Eels at Western Sydney Stadium, 7.35pm.

Raiders squad: 1. Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad, 2. Jordan Rapana, 3. Jarrod Croker (c), 4. Curtis Scott, 5. Nick Cotric, 6. Jack Wighton, 7. George Williams, 8. Josh Papalii, 9. Josh Hodgson (c), 10. Sia Soliola, 11. Joe Tapine, 12. Elliott Whitehead, 13. Corey Horsburgh. Interchange: 14. Siliva Havili, 15. Emre Guler, 16. Ryan Sutton, 17. Hudson Young. Reserves: 18. Bailey Simonsson, 19. Dunamis Lui, 20. Matt Frawley, 21. Tom Starling.

Eels squad: 1. Clinton Gutherson, 2. Maika Sivo, 3. Michael Jennings, 4. Waqa Blake, 5. Blake Ferguson, 6. Dylan Brown, 7. Mitchell Moses, 8. Reagan Campbell-Gillard, 9. Reed Mahoney, 10. Junior Paulo, 11. Shaun Lane, 12. Ryan Matterson, 13. Nathan Brown. Interchange: 14. Ray Stone, 15. Marata Niukore, 16. Oregon Kaufusi, 17. Brad Takairangi. Reserves: 18. David Gower, 19. Daniel Alvaro, 20. George Jennings, 21. Jai Field.