It's second bottom against the bottom team on the NRL ladder this Sunday.
Let the record state that, after three rounds, the Gold Coast Titans currently sit last, where as St George Illawarra are one place ahead of them by virtue of a better points differential.
Neither of them have won a game yet.
St George were winning at Parramatta last week, before doing everything they could to lose it themselves; with poor discipline, poor decision making and poor tactics.
They were also brilliant for much of the match against the Bulldogs in Vegas and went toe to toe with Melbourne Storm for sixty minutes of their Round 2 clash.
The perennially up and down Titans got well and truly bitten by the Sharks in Round 1, before giving the Dolphins a mighty scare at Suncorp Stadium and competing on the scoreboard for twenty minutes of both halves in last week's match with the Cowboys in Townsville.
That defeat will have added to the concerns of Gold Coast coach Josh Hannay. It was meant to be his opposite number, remember, who was under pressure. Cowboys boss Todd Payten will have slept a little easier since, while Hannay will be burning the midnight oil, trying to fix his leaky defence, and a team that struggles with the concept of staying in the weekly ‘grind'.
That's something that has plagued the Titans for many years. Hannay isn't the first coach to think they can give the Gold Coast lads something they're missing.
Justin Holbrook, a very respected and capable coach, guided the team to the promised land of finals for what was to be the last time in 2021.
That was their first foray there since Neil Henry was in charge in 2016; which itself was their first since what now seems like the halcyon days of 2009 and 2010 under John Cartwright. They only arrived in the NRL in 2007.
Despite this chequered history (which is a better finals record than Wests Tigers in that time by the way) Holbrook was jettisoned for dual premiership winner Des Hasler in mid-2023, who arrived there at the end of that particular campaign.
This was meant to be new territory under a ‘winner', remember. But even the winner couldn't win and Hasler's career has possibly ended as a result of his time on the Glitter Strip.
The problems are plain to all those not emotionally invested in the Titans project, to see. Their team is laden with many attacking talents, but when the opposition have the ball, many of their defensive abilities aren't up to scratch. Their ability to be patient and stay in a game is close to non-existent for the vast majority of games they play in.
All the noises coming out of the Titans this off-season suggested an amazing pre-season has taken place and they were finals bound! Yet Josh Hannay takes his place in the C-Bus Super Stadium coaching box on Sunday knowing that going 0-4 at the start means his team will have to defy history to win the NRL competition this year!
As Zero Tackle's stats guru Darren Parkin informed me this week, only Newtown have won the competition after losing the first four. But that was in 1933! Only 92 years ago.
For the record, back then there were only eight teams in the ‘Sydney comp', and a mid-season Kangaroos tour may well have been the cause of a change in fortunes for the competition trailblazers from Henson Park.
After five rounds, the Green and Golds had set sail. Newtown then won eleven of their next twelve matches to take the title. Wests had won four and drawn one of the first six games, but lost several key players, virtually their entire backline thanks to the Kangaroos tour, and didn't win again!
So, unless Josh Hannay can somehow get on the phone to Peter V'Landy's and encourage him to take a boat full of everyone else's players to England for three months, he will need to get a win for his team on Sunday to keep their premiership flame alive.
He might be better served getting his team to reduce the thirteen errors they made against the Cowboys, keeping more possession and getting their completion rate closer, or even higher than the 80% they achieved against the Dolphins.
On the other side of the ball, teaching his profligate right side how to defend and his centres how to slide in defence without having to turn their backs, in order to cut down the 34 points they're conceding on average each week, would also reap some benefit.
If he is looking for someone else to share such a coaching burden with, he could pick up the phone to St George Illawarra Dragons coach Shane Flanagan.
But that is unlikely this week.
Firstly, because it's his opponent on Sunday and secondly, Flanagan might be busy on the phone himself to V'Landy's encouraging him to grow international football, via nautical means, urgently!
That second scenario certainly seems as likely to happen as getting his many tall and heavy players even leaner and more athletic in the next few days. There's no chance of making his senior players a few years younger, either.
Just like their forthcoming opponents, the Dragons have suffered from some questionable recruitment over the years. Their team looks too big and too heavy for this current era of football.
Indeed, they rolled through the Eels for the first quarter of their Round 3 clash thanks to this size advantage. Yet, when Parra had their own extended time with the football and moved it around a little, the Dragons fell to bits defensively and quite alarmingly. They resorted to looking at some dirty tricks in the tackle and needless obstructions on kick defence to help curb the blue and gold momentum they were desperate to stop.
Their attack doesn't have the X-factor that will be in Gold Coast jerseys on Sunday. Half their spine is well over 30 years old and not as sharp as years gone by, and the other half play too laterally and don't challenge the line enough.
Their backs and edge back-rowers, who created some opportunities by virtue of their size and strength on many occasions, failed miserably when it came to making the right decision with an overlap in front of them. It happened that much last week, that, had they made the right choices, they'd be heading to the Coast looking to go level with every team above 9 th as the ladder ahead of Round 4.
The difference between Titans' Hannay and Dragons' Flanagan is length of tenure. Hannay has the advantage of being new to the job on the Gold Coast and can point to a work in progress and in its earliest stages. Flanagan is in his third season at Kogarah, and has his fingerprints over so many aspects of the Red V and their football operations that he cannot really offer the same excuse.
Decision making skills, the form of halves and general tactics are the domain of the coach and, even in terms of personnel, this, by now, should look very much like a Shane Flanagan team.
So, he needs the win, or an unlikely international tour, even more than his opponent this weekend.
