They will come to Campbelltown from far and wide on Friday night to watch two struggling teams do their best to clear that lowest of bars — not finishing last.

They're calling it the Spoon Bowl and it's already gotten bigger than just the Tigers and the Eels. Tickets to the game sold faster than cold beer in hell, enough so that by Tuesday there were none left. It's expected to give the all-time ratings record for its time slot a serious nudge.

Home finals and the last spot in the top eight are on the line later in the weekend but there is no disputing that this game between 16th and 17th has, somehow, become the people's match of the round.

There hasn't been a final-round shootout with last place on the line since 2015, so novelty plays a part, and there's a fair bit of gallows humour to it all as the memes begin to fire.

But the Tigers and Eels are locked in a battle to escape a universal sporting feeling. Not everybody knows what it's like to support a team with a real shot at a grand final, where it's not just an idyll dream but a true possibility. Some unlucky fans can go decades without it. Some never get it at all.

Losing, though? Everybody knows about losing. It's the one thing all teams have done before and will do again. It might be for a season, or a month or just one game but losing is the one compulsory sensation in this sport, the only thing all of us understand.

Losing is what the Spoon Bowl is really about — the prize on Friday night won't be the glory of victory, it'll foisting the shame of defeat onto somebody else.

The difference between finishing 16th and 17th might not seem like much but just like a tightly contested race for the finals, the thin margins are what makes it all worthwhile — only if a run through the top eight is a path to heaven, this is a fight to escape hell.

'All we want to do is fight to the death'

The Tigers are finishing their second-last training session for the year and spirits are high.

There's plenty of talk during ball-work and what they're doing is pretty sharp. Coach Benji Marshall runs in the opposed session, as he does sometimes, and he looks just like you remember.

At the end of the session, there's a mighty cheer when it's announced that Tony Sukkar will be the club's 12th debutant this season and their 38th player overall.

Both marks are the most in the league by a wide margin and all-time club records. It has been that kind of season as Marshall sifts through the roster, panning for gold.

Once training is over, some of the forwards take pot-shots at goal from the sideline. Underrated prop Fonua Pole sends one over the black dot and the boys start howling.

It has been a hard year for the Tigers, as it was last year and the year before that, but today the sun is shining, chins are up and hearts are full.

Better things feel possible the way they only do when a struggling team strings a couple of wins together, which is why they're excited for Friday night.

They want this one. They want it badly, for themselves and their fans. If you don't think there's a difference between finishing last and second-last, just ask the team who's finished last twice in a row.

Api Koroisau readily admits it'll be the biggest game he's played for the club since joining from Penrith.

"All the boys are excited to play this game and not be on the bottom of the table, that's got a lot to do with it," said Koroisau.

"Benji spoke about it on Monday, everyone understands how big it's going to be.

"Nobody wants to finish on the bottom of the table and nobody is going to help us, it'll just be us on the field. It might not mean much to a lot of other people, but it'll mean a lot to the boys."

Koroisau knows exactly how good a win on Friday could feel — he played in the last spoon bowl, a final-round clash between the Panthers and the Knights in 2015.

He doesn't remember much about it other than the win and the party afterwards, but that's kind of fitting given the Tigers' approach in the last few weeks as they look to emulate those efforts.

These Tigers are a young team — rookie five-eighth Lachlan Galvin, fullback Heath Mason and halfback Latu Fainu were all just 10 years old when Koroisau played in that last Spoon Bowl — and the best moments the side has enjoyed this year have come when they've embraced that youthful energy.

The Tigers' progress is not on the line on Friday. Koroisau says he has seen improvement this year, even if the results don't show it yet.

"We're staying in games a lot longer," Koroisau said.

"We have hurt ourselves a lot but the ability to be there at the back end of games, to not stop fighting — we've had some blowouts, but the majority of games have been close come to back end.

"All we want to do is fight to the death."

And while the likes of Galvin, Mason and the three Fainu brothers are no longer the club's future, having fast become the present, that doesn't mean Koroisau needs them to grow up overnight.

"Everyone responds better here to joy and happiness. These guys are so young, all they want to do is play footy and they have so much fun doing it," Koroisau said.

"I don't want to take that away from them by putting pressure on and saying we have to win this game for the club next year.

"Let them go, take the leash off, let these young dudes have that energy. These guys haven't been moulded out of that yet, they come in with this energy and raw talent.

"Sometimes when you get into the NRL system you can play a certain style too much but right now we have these young guys who can just do a lot.

"We'll have to work hard defensively, but in attack? Just let them go."

Galvin has been the NRL's star youngster this year and the 19-year-old would be a unanimous choice for rookie of the year were it not for a suspension he copped earlier this season.

He plays with a composure and confidence beyond his years and on the field he already does a man's job — especially in recent weeks, when he's been far more dominant on the ball and played a crucial role in the side's last two wins.

Galvin will play in bigger games than this one in the years to come but he's still at the stage of his career where everything is new enough that most games already feel big.

The contract dramas of a few months ago are well behind him and he's locked in on the future and its possibilities, which he's sure will end the way he wants with a certainty only youth can provide.

When you're fresh 19, every pay cheque's still a fortune, every meal's a feast and every dream can still come true.

"We're just enjoying it, we're loving our rugby league, it's a job for us but you can't treat it like that. We play rugby league because we love it," Galvin said.

"It's going to be a massive turning point for us going into next year if we come out with a good result.

"We have our new signings for next year, pre-season starts in November — we're really building."

The strangest victory of all

Things are a little different up Parramatta way. At the joint venture, avoiding the spoon is something the players have openly spoken about for several weeks.

Getting young fellas into the top grade is important, but that's not as tangible as stacking up wins and after back-to-back last-placed finishes, the Tigers will take whatever definitive progress they can get.

The Eels aren't as comfortable at this depth. This is a team that was in the grand final just two years ago and their presence in the Spoon Bowl is more surprising. They're talking about it, but not as much.

"It's been mentioned — the best way with these things is to address the elephant in the room. We owe it to our fans, our staff, the players moving on, everybody, not to come last," said backrower Shaun Lane.

"It's not much better coming second last or third last, but there's a label around coming last.

"It's extra motivation, but everyone has been competing hard regardless for weeks and I'm not expecting anything different."

It took a lot of things going wrong for Parra to end up here — Junior Paulo's season was over after round 18, J'maine Hopgood played just 12 games and Mitchell Moses only made it through eight.

Longtime coach Brad Arthur got sacked, some key forwards all started to look old at the same time and a host of injuries hit.

It's meant that players who weren't even on the first-grade radar at the beginning of the year have been thrust into action.

Jake Tago, for example, started the season on a part-time contract. As recently as a week or two before his NRL debut in round 18, Lane didn't know his name because Tago had barely trained with the top squad.

"For blokes like that to come in and give it their all, attack the game with confidence and fit into the team and immerse themselves in our culture, that's been a bright spot," Lane said.

"Baz [interim coach Trent Barrett] has encouraged and empowered whoever's come into the game to compete their hardest and play their best footy."

While the Tigers are sure the future lies with their youth and are now trying to put the pieces around them, the Eels are at the other end of the spectrum.

In Moses, Dylan Brown, Clint Gutherson and the incoming Zac Lomax they have a core of star players and need to fill in the spaces between them.

New coach Jason Ryles will take control over the summer and what he wants to mould the Eels into is anyone's guess.

That's what's made the last few weeks more important than your usual death march towards the summer.

It's an audition of sorts, as players try to prove they have what it takes to be part of the revolution and become a key cog of Ryles's Eels.

What that team looks like is impossible to say right now and the long pre-season over the summer will likely do more than anything else to determining their futures.

But it can't hurt to hold the gloves up, like Luca Moretti did in the bizarre 44-40 win over the Dragons last week.

It was lost among the 84 total points, but Moretti played the best game of his career, running for 164 metres with ball in hand as the Eels scored an unprecedented win.

Conceding 40 points in an unusual way to win — Moretti said he couldn't have shown his face for a month if they'd lost while Lane compared the Dragons' late run of five tries in 11 minutes to an out-of-body experience — but it's still a win they're proud of.

Pride is what's kept them going in recent weeks, when they've upset the Warriors, nearly beaten the Panthers and put up a credible showing against the Storm, and they'll carry it again into Friday.

"The last eight weeks we've been in most games by a try, we're still trying to turn up every week," Moretti said.

"To call a spade a spade, we could have chucked in the towel weeks ago. But everyone hasn't played the victim card, we've turned up with a good attitude and kept trying to win.

"It'd be easy for us to play the victim and come up for excuses why we're not playing well, there's a lot of outs. But we want to take responsibility for what we can."

"We all have a lot of pride. We never want to lose.

"Everyone knows about it [the Spoon Bowl], there's so much pride and history in this jersey and we don't want to let it down, or our families, or the fans — they've been in it as much as we have."

Fans of both sides would give plenty for a win on Friday, even though the numbers say there won't be much difference between them.

Regardless of the result, it will be Parramatta's worst season since 2018, when they last claimed the spoon, and it will be the Tigers' best year since 2021, when they rose to the retroactively dizzying heights of 13th.

But they'll be playing for what pride and honour and enjoyment they can find and those things are important. They'll be playing for one another, because even struggling teams have some good times and after Friday, they'll never be together in this particular group again.

They'll be playing for a future not everyone on the roster will survive to see and for the promise of better times ahead, when they don't have to wait until the last game of the season to save themselves from propping up the rest of the ladder.

If the Tigers win, it will be a strange kind of triumph. If Parramatta do, it's more of a relief. The Eels have fallen to the level of this match while the Tigers have clawed their way up to it.

But both are chasing the same goal, the strangest victory of all, where the spoils of victory pale in comparison to the punishment of defeat.

There is nothing left to wait for and everything to play for, because a wooden spoon is a painful thing and it sticks. A reminder of it is a cruel blow that always lands.

Once it's locked up, there's a long summer before it can get shrugged off again, months and months where a team has nowhere to go and nothing left to be.

It's time for the Tigers and Eels to live a lot or die a little. It's time to feel the difference between loving to win and hating to lose, to use whatever desperation that's left as a weapon and to try and save a little piece of themselves by condemning someone else.