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Bulldogs defence in action during the NRL, Round 6, Parramatta Eels v Bulldogs match at ANZ Stadium in Sydney, Sunday, April 19, 2009. The Bulldogs beat the Eels 48-18. AAP Image/Action Photographics, Grant Trouville
No wonder the Bulldogs-Eels clash on Friday will set a record for a crowd at a finals match. The game takes rugby league back to its heartland, the wild west of Sydney, and to a time before the fancy, glitzy expansion to a NSW competition took it across the Tasman and along the length of the eastern seaboard of Australia.
It’s no accident that the record for finals matches in Sydney is 57,973 and was set in 1963 when Parramatta and St George played each other (clashed, surely?) at the spiritual home of rugby league in Sydney, the great oval of the SCG.
These were the days of Rex Mossop and his unique take on rugby league as a fighting man’s game. “A good punch,” he once observed, “never hurt anyone.”
You knew what he meant, but some of the hits did send players into dizzy-land and false teeth were a requirement of most players, especially the forwards.
Some memorable quotes have been given an airing from some of the hard men who played for these two great clubs during the hard days when rugby league was a battlers code, for spectators and players.
Here is Terry Lamb, the great backer-upper, talking about what he’d do if his opponent was trying to protect a broken jaw, as Brett Kimmorley will be doing on Friday: “I would be belting the shit out of him.”
And remember the hard man Peter Tunks, the giant battering ram, rumbling up with the ball and thumping anyone with the ball or in his vicinity when he was on defence.
Here’s what he said about trying to contain Ray Price: “You’ve no idea how good he was. He’s probably the toughest player I ever played against, the punishment we used to give him … There were some terrible things we did to him. We had plenty of stinks but nobody got killed.”
I love that last line.
Judging by the photos of Price after the matches, which showed him splayed out on the bench, drained of energy and exhausted as if he’d been flayed by a threshing machine, the great destroyer must have come close to being annihilated.
Photographers at the SMH told me that they’d come into the Parramatta dressing after a finals match, and when Price would see them, he’d immediately collapse as if he’d been hit by a sledge hammer.
The dramatic shot of him would appear in the newspaper next day with Price looking (in the SMH’s Andrew Stephenson’s splendid phrase) rather like “the Black Knight of Monty Python fame who absorbed incredible physical punishment yet with the same leer on his face.”
I’m hoping Parramatta get up and go on to win the grand final.
This is mainly because I loved the way the Jack Gibson-coached Parramatta sides played and won their finals with zip and courage. The 2009 model has the same sort of style, with Daniel Anderson doing a Gibson with them.
There is also the consideration that the way Price was treated by the Sullivan regime was unacceptable behaviour towards one of the club’s greatest players, and indeed one of the code’s finest.
With Price back in favour and allowed to talk to the players and encourage them to emulate the great deeds of the past, Parramatta are invoking their glory days with a panache and dash that must make Peter Sterling, Mick Cronin, and Brett Kenny (back in the fold again, at last) feel like taking a line from Steve Mortimer’s address to the Bulldogs before one of their grand finals victories: “I wish everyone a good game. Let’s get out there and f—ing bash them.”
Let the battle of the wild west begin!