One of the systems we used on tour to maintain reasonable order and efficiency was the appointment of ‘duty boys’, whose responsibility it was to see that each day’s program went according to plan. A key part of this was getting people out of bed and ensuring they were on time for team events. For one of the club games, the duty boy was Graham Wilson.We usually used a non-player as duty boy on match days, but somehow he got the job for this particular day despite the fact that he was to play the game. When we got on to the bus to head off for the match, the usual loiterers were missing, so Graham as duty boy went off to find them. He got them all back to the bus, and off we went. It wasn’t until we arrived at the ground that we realised we were short a second rower. Graham had gone back for a final check of the hotel, and we had taken off without him. He had to chase us in a cab. Fortunately all the towns where we played in the north of England are fairly close together, but it was a hefty fare just the same, and Graham was less than happy.
Another of the roles that I found fell to the captain–coach was that of counsellor. Mood can be a serious indicator of trouble on tour, and keeping tabs on signs of distress was imperative. At one point I noticed that Ken Irvine had gone into his shell a bit. He was morose at times, and it seemed clear that something was worrying him. ‘Is everything OK at home, Kenny?’ I asked. I had had enough experience myself of the trials of separation from loved ones to know that a downer on tour was mostly based in the difficulties of being away from home. Ken explained that he was worried about his wife, whose letters had made clear she was pretty lonely and was finding the long tour hard to handle. I volunteered to ring Val for him and see how things were, but Ken said he would ring that night. He did, and just the sound of each other’s voices helped. He was fine after that and had a wonderful tour. Often it was that simple, but I found it important just the same to keep an eye out for the telltale signs of homesickness or worry about those at home, because nothing can undermine a tour more quickly.
After the serious business of England, our three-Test sojourn in France felt more relaxed. This was always a danger at the end of an England campaign. The French are an erratic lot when it comes to Rugby League, but they can play some magnificent football, especially when they get the wind in their hair and decide to chuck the ball about. And their referees are totally unpredictable. Let your concentration drop against the French and you can find yourself in serious trouble on a number of fronts. Yet as we soaked up an entirely different culture, it was inevitable there would be some let-down after winning the Ashes. A few of the boys wanted to take some days off and go to Spain for a bit of a holiday. I told them that would be fine so long as we won the first Test. We lost. Spain was off the agenda. They all accepted that, and when we won the next two Tests it seemed worth it. It would have been an awful result if we had let defeat by the French tarnish what we all regarded then and now as the greatest tour of them all.
24
A TIME FOR HEROES
IN A TIME BEFORE replacements were allowed in Rugby League, toughing it out was often the measure of a man. Leaving the field, even to nurse a broken bone, was hard to do if the match was tight and your mates needed you. Heroes were made in such circumstances. Clive Churchill once played on with a broken arm to set up a South Sydney premiership win. Alan Prescott led England for most of a Test match with a broken arm hanging useless at his side to win the Ashes. Some played on with broken jaws and missing teeth, and a concussion that rendered a man senseless was not even considered a real injury. It was at once heroic and stupid, and it defined a time in which Rugby League, like boxing, had a bloodied edge to it. It was a hard game for hard men.
Wiser minds understood the folly of not allowing replacements. It was dangerous for the injured, obviously. But it also distorted contests when continuing was impossible and a team played short, or when crippled players continued on the field despite being beyond useful contribution. Introducing replacements was not easy. Any advantage a team could find in those days was taken, legal or illegal, and abusing a rule that allowed replacements was relatively easy. If Johnny was not going well or was a bit tired, it was not difficult to feign injury and get somebody fitter and fresher into the fray. Administrators tried a range of systems to allow genuine replacement and discourage rorters. They made a tentative start in the early ’60s by allowing a replacement for an injured player in the first half only, and then only with a player who had played an earlier game.They limited it to two. By 1970 they extended it to allow replacements through the full game. By 1984 they were allowing four replacements.
They might have been better off if they had left it at that. But by the middle ’80s when blood-borne disease had become a concern, they started the blood bin, and then the head bin to have concussed players checked out. By the 1987 grand final, when Manly were discovering allegedly semi-conscious players all over the park, the head bin became a revolving door. Tired players were off for a ten-minute rest, and fresh players enthusiastically grabbed their spot.Trying to contain the replacement rule to genuine purposes of safety and match integrity died that day. Since then it has pretty much been open slather.
The next year the league introduced two fresh reserves, and by the early ’90s it was four fresh reserves and unlimited interchange. They could change whoever they liked for whatever reason, as often as they wanted. That was overdone, too, so they limited it to twelve interchanges, and then ten. A lot of old players hate it. It keeps the game fast and intense, but it tightens defences in the late stages of games where they once opened up. It diminishes the value of endurance, and to men of the Provan–Summons era, it is hard to escape a sense of artificiality in the way it distorts a contest.
NORM PROVAN
One of the fundamentals of Rugby League as I saw it was to be in top physical condition. I worked hard on my condition so that I knew I could go as hard at the end of the game as at the beginning.When I started to feel that I couldn’t, I knew that was the time I had to retire.To me Rugby League was an 80-minute game, and despite all our talents I still believe St George were as good as they were through my era because they were fitter than anybody else. These days there is not the reward for that sort of fitness that there should be. Blokes lacking endurance just get replaced. They come off, have a rest, then go back looking refreshed, lift their pace, and everybody says how good they are. I don’t think so. If they were as good as they should be, they wouldn’t have had to come off in the first place.
You might have guessed I’m not a fan of the modern replacement rule. I know things change, and I know there is an argument for playing the whole game with people who can hack it. But it is just not real for me.The turnover is too high. It upsets the rhythm of the game and it denies the advantages that should be there for players with endurance. Much of what we did in my time was geared to bring its greatest profit in the late stages of a game. You would wear them down in the forwards, and when defences tired in the last quarter of the game, that’s when things would open up. It meant that the overall standard of a team was important. Forwards to lay the foundation, fitness to keep it all going, and flourish at the end when the talents of your quick men really came to the fore.
You hear a lot about Rugby League being a game of character. To me character is lots of things. It’s how hard you try. It’s how hard you commit yourself to your mates. It’s how well you can handle a bit of adversity. It’s how you cope with a little pain. And above all, it’s not giving up. The way the replacement rule was in our day sorted out the character in a team. It found men of great courage, who would bear setbacks that would horrify a modern player just so they didn’t let down their team-mates. When I first started following Saints, Johnny Hawke was their five-eighth and captain, and he played a marvellous game in the 1949 grand final to win the premiership. But I remember how distraught everybody was when he got hurt in the semi-final. He broke his upper jaw and damaged a lot of teeth against Souths, and they carted him off in terrible shape. But he came back on to the
field that day to set up the winning try. I don’t know what they did to fix his teeth and his jaw, but he was back for the grand final three weeks later and was the dominant player.
There was a lot of courage involved, but somehow it didn’t seem out of the ordinary. Clive Churchill broke his arm early in a game against Manly in 1955, but played out the game and kicked a winning goal from the sideline. It was part of an amazing run of eleven wins to climb from nowhere and win the premiership. Then there was our own Bill Wilson, who broke his forearm against Balmain early in a game somewhere in the middle 1950s. He wouldn’t even think about leaving.You could see the bend in his arm, and he must have been in awful pain, but he just kept going and made a pretty good contribution to the game, too. Billy was doing that all the time. Once he went off to hospital for some serious repair to a face wound but got back in time for the late part of the game.They didn’t come any tougher than Bill Wilson.
I can remember Johnny Raper playing on with a cracked breastbone, and of course there was that heroic effort in Brisbane in 1958 when the English captain Alan Prescott broke his arm in the first few minutes and refused to leave. We tried everything we knew to sort him out, but he kept going and was there at the end when England won the game and claimed the Ashes. I can remember myself on a number of occasions staggering back to the field when I had had a knock to the head and had only a rough idea of where I was or what I was doing. People were getting knocked out all the time, coming to and carrying on. It wasn’t even considered a real injury in those days. So long as your legs worked you were OK. These days a lot more is understood about the dangers of concussion and a mandatory period out of football is commonplace, but in those days anything went.
Writing about it now, all these years on, I can see that much of what we did in football half a century ago was pretty foolhardy. But it had character. It had a quality that probably has been romanticised a little but was very real and very important to all of us who played the game then. It is hard to find a happy medium, but the replacement rule seems to have gone from one extreme to the other. It might have been a bit silly in our time to have to play on with broken bones. But these days the relentless intrusion of the interchange system is crazy. It turns the game into musical chairs.
ARTHUR SUMMONS
It was always my belief that one of the great virtues of a good Rugby League team was stamina. Being able to go the distance. Clearly the way the game is structured today is largely a result of the introduction of the interchange rule. Teams are built to maximise the rule’s potential. Good defenders go on when the game needs tightening, game-breakers go on when they need to pull something out of the box in attack. As a result the pace and the shape of the game are determined by how well replacements are made. It is a feature of Rugby League that is here to stay, and it is just one of many things that make the game today a very different game from the one that we used to play. But to those of us who did play under the no-replacement rule, the thing that sticks in our craw most about the replacement system today is that it rewards the wrong people. It rewards the fatigued . . . those who lack stamina. Giving them a rest so they can revive themselves for later heroics goes against the grain as far as I am concerned.
For entertainment value, you can see why they do it the way they do. Fresh people lift the competitive tension. They keep the game faster than it would otherwise be. And they offer some variety, especially late in games if things are tight. But there is an argument, too, that games used to break open at the end, when people were tired. That’s when all the fun started. Building a game meant the good sides who were fit and had stamina did all the heavy work early, then reaped the reward in the late stages of their matches. I don’t particularly like the interchange system. But I didn’t like the other extreme that meant you played short if someone was hurt, or a crippled player just kept going when it was obviously dangerous to do so. There is a fine line between being a hero and being stupid. My attitude would be to allow replacements, but to make them permanent. A player who comes off the field should stay off the field. Make a replacement by all means, but not over and over, with players doing the on-again-off-again thing. That’s a frustration, and at its core I don’t think it is in the spirit of the game.
25
THE MENTOR CHALLENGE
WHEN NORM PROVAN LISTS the high points of a celebrated Rugby League career, there is no shortage of contenders. The unbeaten 1959 premiership year, his last game in the 1965 grand final, Tests against England, a Kangaroo tour, ten premierships all up—the list goes on and on. But ask him to nominate the achievement that he most relishes, and he barely hesitates. It was his brief coaching roles through the ’70s, when he lifted both Parramatta and the young Cronulla–Sutherland clubs to new levels of performance.
NORM PROVAN
My first experience as a non-playing coach was in 1968, when I took on St George. I had been gone only two years as a player, but already things were very different. Only a handful of my old team-mates were still there. Johnny King, ‘Changa’ Langlands and Billy Smith were still playing in the backs, and Elton Rasmussen, Johnny Raper and Dick Huddart in the forwards. It was a tidy group, but Ian Walsh had gone and Reg Gasnier too, and it was clear the club was moving on to a new era. Names like Phil Hawthorne and John Wittenberg and Tony Branson and the Maddison boys Keith and Ken were now central to the St George effort.
But the biggest change of all was the introduction of the four-tackle rule. This was brought in for the 1967 season after St George’s final premiership in the eleven-year sequence. It was designed I think mainly to thwart the sort of dominance Saints had had through that winning decade. Unlimited tackles meant a good side could hang on to the ball for very long periods, and I suppose there was an argument for some sort of modification. But the four-tackle rule was patently ridiculous. You had no time to settle into any sort of patterns. You had the ball, you worked it a few times, and then when you were starting to build into something worthwhile you had to hand it over. It made the football erratic. We seemed to be playing all the time in an atmosphere of blind panic.
When the four-tackle rule was introduced I was writing a newspaper column, and I slammed it for all I was worth. I drew a fair bit of criticism for that, particularly from the league chiefs who had endorsed the rule in the first place. That seemed to be my lot quite often. I had also dared raise the question of whether a try was undervalued at three points and should be raised to four points. They gave me a hard time over that, too. The four-point try came in fourteen years later . . . a lot of wasted years if you ask me . . . and the four-tackle rule eventually was extended to six, which is what applies today. Mind you, it took them four years to realise what a farce the four-tackle rule was. I still think six tackles distorts the game. I suppose it is natural to favour the game you grew up with, but I loved the days of unlimited tackle. It allowed you to mix it in the forwards and to build dominance that is much harder to build today. That was a game that required real grit.
I found coaching under the four-tackle rule as hard as I found watching the game under the four-tackle rule.You had to get everything done so quickly.You had to develop accurate kickers, since so much of the time it was the only way you could score a try. We were lucky at the time to have brought Phil Hawthorne into the club. He had been an outstanding Wallaby in a very good team, and was an immaculate kicker of the football who landed a lot of field goals in his Rugby days. Kicking had suddenly become important, and Hawthorne was a very accurate kicker. He ended up not only playing for Australia but captaining Australia, so I suppose he was one player that the limited-tackle rule helped.
There were a lot of things Saints had to get used to through 1968. The previous winter Ian Walsh’s team had been knocked over in the final by Canterbury to break the sequence of premiership wins. Now we were undergoing great personnel change, and there was no doubt that an era had ended and another was under way. For all that, we had a pretty good season. We made the minor semi where we beat E
asts, and though we scored two tries each in the final against Souths we lost on goal kicks. Souths were premiers that year, and they had built a marvellous team that dominated the competition for a few seasons as Saints had dominated before them. I stayed in the coaching role with Saints only for the one season. Pressures with my electrical goods business were building, and I still thought the captain–coach role was a better option for Saints. They made Johnny Raper captain–coach for the following season.
It was six years before I had another go, this time at Parramatta. They made an offer when I was getting the itch again, and the challenge was inviting. They were gathering a good-looking team and they had nowhere to go but up after finishing at the bottom of the table the year before. Good teams always start in the forwards, and Parramatta had a good pack. Ray Higgs, Bob O’Reilly, John McMartin, John Quayle and Denis Fitzgerald were all high-quality forwards. In the backs men like Denis Pittard and Jim Porter were strong performers as well, and though we were a few years short of the Peter Sterling–Brett Kenny era, we were reasonably well equipped. First problem was to get them fit. It seemed to me the club had grown accustomed to losing, and the necessary work was not being done. I drove them hard those early weeks and we won the pre-season competition. By the end of the competition proper we had improved from last to fifth. Trouble was, two other clubs—Wests and Balmain—shared fifth spot with us, which in those days meant a series of play-offs before a semi-finalist could be declared.
The Gladiators Page 18
