It didn’t stop the local press hoeing in. They had picked up on the early discussion about co-opting Arthur Clues, and as the first Test neared there were plenty of stories about the Kangaroos not having the off-field coach they needed. Most of the papers picked up on this theme, claiming we did not have the moves or the tactics to score tries against solid English defences. For a while I felt my morale a little dented, since coaching was my responsibility and the theme here was that I was failing. Yet I didn’t feel that way. As a team I think we saw the whole debate as a campaign to destabilise us. The English had tried everything else, after all.There was plenty of biff in the matches, and the referees, to put it as diplomatically as possible, were less than sympathetic to us.
There was pressure at home too. Clive Churchill, who had coached the 1959 Kangaroos, had been considered the likely tour coach but was overlooked, presumably as a cost-saving measure following the financial failure of a South African visit to Australia earlier in the year. He expressed his disappointment at not being on the tour, and a lot of people supported him. I would have loved to have Clive there. But the fact was that he wasn’t there, and if I was in charge that was the way it would be. We resisted all attempts to include Arthur Clues or anyone else in our team group. By the time we had run in twelve tries in the second Test and secured the Ashes in England as no team had ever done before, I felt everything about us—coaching and tactics included—had been vindicated.
My own tour shifted direction a couple of weeks before the first Test when I damaged knee ligaments in a game against St Helens, then the most powerful of the English clubs. I was off the field halfway through the first half. There were mixed emotions that day. The injury clearly was not good news for me, despite the great optimism for recovery we always had in an era when diagnosis was more vague. But the Kangaroos won a very good victory that day, playing their best football of the tour at precisely the right time, and making it clear to everybody that the Test series was nowhere near the English fait accompli the local pundits had assumed it to be. Realistically, it might also have helped in that prolonged absence gave me the chance to concentrate solely on coaching, despite the fact that I was having non-stop treatment and training as best I could in an attempt to get back on the field. I finished up having to miss the first and second Tests. I returned to active duty a couple of games before the final Test, but I declined to put myself into that final Test team. The team, with Barry Muir at halfback and Earl Harrison at five-eighth, had played supreme Rugby League to win the first two encounters with England, the second of them by 50 points to 12. In no way was I going to upend it.
The first two Test matches worked brilliantly for us. We achieved the forward dominance we wanted, and the singular brilliance of our backs did the rest. The first was played at Wembley Stadium in London on a Wednesday night. It was the first Test match played under lights, and we won 28–2. Reg Gasnier scored three tries to add to the reputation he had won as a rookie on the 1959 tour. One of them was a 70-metre affair in which the ball travelled through half a dozen pairs of hands, but as always Gasnier’s unique acceleration and pace provided the finish. It was also Graeme Langlands’ first Test. Langlands had been chosen for the tour as a winger, though he had played most of his football to that point as a fullback. We also had Ken Thornett and Les Johns on the tour, each of whom would still be among the greatest fullbacks of Australian Rugby League, up there with the likes of Billy Slater despite the various changes in the game. Leaving Johns out was hard enough, but we just couldn’t leave Langlands out as well. So we tried him at centre, and he was an instant success. With Langlands’ giant sidestep, as well as his ability to read the play, and Gasnier’s change of pace and brilliant running, the Australian backs had a picnic.
As we had planned at our first team meeting, however, it was the dominance of the Australian forwards that laid the foundation of our Ashes triumph. In that first Test they were impregnable, their defence so relentless and so damaging that the Brits were unable to score a try—the first time that had happened to them since the famous SCG mud Test of 1950. Ian Walsh and Noel Kelly were magnificent in the way they directed matters. Peter Gallagher, Brian Hambly and Dick Thornett took a lot of stopping. Johnny Raper was simply Johnny Raper. He was everywhere, creating space for supports when he had the ball and dragging people down all over the park when they had the ball.
The emergence of Dick Thornett was one of the real successes of the team. A triple international who had represented Australia in water polo at the Olympics and won praise from the giant New Zealand Rugby forward Colin Meads as a high-impact Wallaby, Dick was in his first season of Rugby League. Thornett brought to the Australian pack the same sort of dynamic that Dick Huddart had given Great Britain as they stitched us up a couple of times in Australia the previous year. He was a powerful running forward, fast as well as big, and with a sense of timing that allowed him to hit the line at precisely the right time.
One of his breaks that covered 30 metres or more gave Gasnier a try in the first Test, and throughout the tour his power running added a string to our bow that the team would not have had without him. The Thornetts were an outstanding breed. I had toured with the eldest brother, John, on Wallaby tours of Britain and New Zealand, and before we left Sydney John had captained Australia to an historic drawn series against the South African Springboks. Ken at fullback had made a huge mark with Leeds in England, joined Parramatta, and provided serious thrust to the Australian side for the strength of his running. He scored a powerful try in that Wembley Test which was important to the outcome.
That Kangaroo tour, however, will always be defined by the events of November 9, 1963, in what has become popularly known as the Swinton Massacre. Our attitude to this second Test had not changed. If we were to take the Ashes home we had to win it, since we couldn’t rely on a third Test decider. We prepared accordingly, and on the day our team produced a performance of a quality that I doubt had ever been seen before and has perhaps not been matched since.That we scored 50 points, a record, and managed twelve tries, another record, says it all. Everybody was on song—the wingers Irvine and Dimond scored five tries between them, the centres Gasnier and Langlands two each. The forwards ran like the wind. It was Rugby League beyond the imagination.
But for all of this excellence, there was one performance that was without doubt the greatest individual performance I have ever seen on a football field. This was the effort of our lock John Raper. In defence he covered the field like a vacuum cleaner, scything down anything that looked like an England break. In attack he was everywhere, creating space for supports with neat passes, making breaks, joining raids . . . whatever needed to be done, Raper seemed to be there to do it. Often he turned up when there was nothing on, but still found some way of twisting the Lion’s tail. He had a serious hand in nine of the twelve tries, a decisive hand in many of them. Even by the standards Raper seemed to set as a matter of course, this was one out of the box.
England had their setbacks. In the first Test they lost five-eighth Dave Bolton midway through the first half, and in the second both centre Eric Ashton and the new five-eighth Frank Myler were first-half casualties, leaving them two men short in the age of no replacements. But nobody in England was offering any excuses after our second Test win.The general consensus was that it was no contest. Indeed, it seemed to us they could have played with eighteen men and we still would have thrashed them. The final Test was as we had always expected it would be. They brought in a new referee, one ‘Sergeant-Major’ Eric Clay, who proved a more formidable adversary for us than our English opponents.
As frustrations built, the game got a little out of hand. Barry Muir chased his opposing half, Alex Murphy, to kick him in the backside and got sent off. Barry was never the most discreet of individuals. The crowd thought his attack on Murphy a bit over the top, and started pelting him with fruit or whatever they could lay their hands on as he left the field. He responded by grabbing a water bucket and half dro
wning some of them. A subsequent all-in brawl saw Brian Hambly and the English prop Cliff Watson dismissed, and by the time it was mercifully over England had climbed back to win 16–5. At the after-match dinner, our manager Jack Lynch made the usual diplomatic speech. He thanked the English for the game and said it was nice to win the Ashes, and he added a quick review of the performance of Sergeant-Major Clay. He was less than diplomatic now, getting stuck into Clay’s performance in a way that brought some rebuke from our hosts. ‘About the referee you call Sergeant-Major Clay,’ he summed up at the end of a long tirade, ‘after today perhaps you should make him a Brigadier.’ We all applauded wildly, to the general consternation of the English.
We rounded off the tour in France, where the tendency to relax a little after the hard work of Britain is always a danger. We lost the first Test against a good French side, but straightened up after that and finished up winning the next two. I managed to return to the team for the last two Tests. As a player, injury had made the tour a bit of a disappointment for me. But the overall experience was unmatchable.
23
BOYS WILL BE BOYS
ARTHUR SUMMONS
Kangaroo tours over the years have carried a reputation that is colourful yet largely mythical. Stories of naked men in bowler hats parading around the north of England, as was alleged to have happened in 1967, may or may not be true. But they have perpetuated a vision of Kangaroo tours as wild and woolly affairs, where standards are pretty loose. I certainly never found it that way on our tour of 1963–64. Sure, there were some pranks, and certainly there were times when the boys had a little more to drink than was good for them. But what else do you expect with young men locked away on a windy hill in Yorkshire, seemingly miles from anywhere, in a hotel that should have been condemned? It was a boring existence, yet at no time did I ever feel that our team overstepped the mark. In fact, in senior players like Ian Walsh, John Raper, Reg Gasnier and Noel Kelly, I would say we had very sound individuals who supported me whole-heartedly and made sure the tour achieved for us what we wanted to achieve. We would not have won otherwise.
Mind you, at times it was a close-run thing.When we arrived at the Troutbeck Hotel in the little town of Ilkley, on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, my first decision was aimed at establishing the discipline I knew was vital to the tour. Given some experience at home, and given the legend he already had built around himself, I considered it important to keep Johnny Raper on a short leash. So as we allocated the room list, I arranged to have John as my room-mate, where I could keep an eye on him. I wasn’t sure how he would take it. He might well have considered that I was treating him as an errant schoolboy, and reacted accordingly.
‘That’s terrific, Arthur,’ he said when I gave him the news. ‘Can I take your bags up for you?’ I was a bit nonplussed at such amiable behaviour, but he lugged all the bags—mine and his—up to our room as I made sure everybody else was comfortable. When I got to the room Raper had claimed the double bed and was lying there with a big grin on his face. He had consigned me to the stretcher-like single bed tucked away in a corner. No flies on Rapes. He knew exactly how the system worked, and he thought it much better if it worked principally for him. Captain–coach or not, I did not see the point of arguing. He had got me fair and square at our first entanglement, and I begrudgingly admired him for that. As the tour wore on, Raper and I became very happy room-mates, and his bubbly nature contributed every bit as much to the tour as his football did.
I was obsessive within myself through those early days and weeks to make sure I kept a firm hand on things, without smothering the boys’ natural exuberance. It was a fine line. Reg Gasnier was rooming with the big Wests winger Peter Dimond, who he did not really know all that well except as a violent opponent who would hit him with a stiff-arm tackle whenever he could catch him. By the community average, Reg was Mr Immaculate, and he let me know he did not particularly fancy a Western Suburbs biff artist as a room-mate. I quietly explained to Reg that Peter was a very nice man, as was he, and that I thought they would get on just fine once they got to know each other better. Dimond, of course, was a total gentleman off the field, one of those white-line-fever types who turned into something else when he was on it. I explained to Reg that if he really wanted to formalise the complaint he should talk to the managers, and that if a ticket home was required for him they would arrange it. Gasnier and Dimond shared the room. They became great mates, and the football they played together on the left side of the field throughout the tour was magic.
That room, however, was a magnet for some of the less refined members of the party. Gasnier was an ordered, neat sort of person who would consider it a failing if his tie was crooked. Most of the boys were hardly obsessed with tidiness and treated their rooms as wayward teenagers would. Clothes would be flung anywhere and everywhere. Some of them decided it was time Reg learned to be a little more relaxed about such things, so with Barry Muir in the lead they corralled a sheep from the back of the pub somewhere and wheeled it into Gaz’s room. They left it there. When Reg got back, the sheep had nearly demolished the place. Reg was seriously displeased. Dimond didn’t let a lot worry him, but he was a bit shirty about the clean-up job as well. Muir and his miscreant mates were beside themselves with laughter.
For the captain–coach, managing these things was a constant dilemma of judgement and balance.The Troutbeck was a shocking place to live, and its remoteness meant it was boring. If the lads didn’t have something to laugh about they would have turned nasty, and that’s when real trouble is at hand. Everybody understood that, and once we had helped Gasnier and Dimond clean up their room, it was something we could all laugh about. A modern team would never countenance the sort of conditions under which we lived. The furniture was old and unsound. At one stage Dick Thornett simply sat down and his chair disintegrated under him.
The best training run we did was the flat-chat race up the hill to the pub after our workouts, because we knew only the first three arrivals would get a hot shower. The incentive for that was huge. A cold shower in Yorkshire in winter is not something that finds its way into travel brochures. Worse still, the manager of the place was a humourless bloke who treated us like squatters. We were always getting bills for breaking things when the fittings were on their last legs, and the meals were always chicken done this way and that in a manner that might have found its way into a tyre factory. One of the travelling correspondents was Mike Gibson, at the very start of an illustrious career. He started one story for the Daily Telegraph about the boredom of the place with the news that ‘The darts don’t stick in the dartboard any more,’ such a workout had the board been given. For me, it was a far cry from the Park Lane Hotel in Mayfair, where we had stayed in five-star comfort on the Wallaby tour a few years before.
Such an environment inspired some innovative thinking. Leeds was eleven miles away, and getting there was not easy. So the boys clubbed in and bought a couple of old bombs that were well and truly on their last legs but good enough to last a few weeks and provide some mobility. They became a treasured link with the bright lights of Leeds, not that there were too many bright lights even there. But at least there was civilisation, and that was a start. The cars rattled and shook and some of the driving was less than sedate, but everybody survived and the mobility made a difference to general morale. Cars became a tradition after that on future Kangaroo tours, even when the team stayed at the big casino-hotel in Leeds and lived in comparative luxury. More than one of those old bombs in later years finished up in local waterways when their job was done.
Keeping things on the straight and narrow was a constant challenge and required some diplomacy. One of the routines I organised was an occasional walk on the moors that lapped against the hotel. It was not the most exciting of activities, but in the absence of much else it was a good way to get the team together and, importantly, to get them out of the pub and away from the grinding boredom of the place. Still, convincing them of the wisdom of a stroll ar
ound the countryside was no easy task. At a team meeting before one of these treks, Ian Walsh announced that he had sore shins and wouldn’t be going. There was no doubt that Ian did indeed have sore shins . . . rival hookers took great delight in kicking the daylights out of them in the wild scrums that were a tour staple. But right or wrong, I interpreted his public announcement as something the rest of the troops might see as open defiance.
Walsh was the vice-captain on tour, captained the team in all the Tests of the English section while I was out of action, and did a sterling job on all fronts. He played tough, uncompromising football that was an inspiration to all around him, and when the tour post-mortems were done he was given widespread acclaim for the pivotal part he had played in our success. But something told me I had to stand and be counted over the walk on the moors, and I insisted he come. There was a brief but tense standoff. Had he mentioned it to me privately it would not have been a problem, but a lot of them were less than excited by the prospect of a country walk, and if I yielded to Walsh I might have had a rebellion on my hands. Ian was fine. He turned up at the appointed time and my authority was preserved—most of it, anyway. As Walsh sat and waited for us to leave, Barry Muir and his irascibles were nowhere to be found. Arthur Sparks and I scoured the hotel. We hauled them from under beds and out of cupboards and various hiding places they had found to tease me. We all set off for the moors laughing. The whole thing was a bit like playing fish, knowing when to pull hard on the line and when to let it play out a little.
The Gladiators Page 17
