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As the Storm and Cowboys prepare for today’s NRL grand final, somewhere in an alternate timeline the Western Reds and Adelaide Rams are lacing their boots up for the big dance.
The Reds, Rams, Storm and Cowboys – together with the Auckland Warriors, Hunter Mariners and South Queensland Crushers – were introduced during a tumultuous four years that coincided with the Super League war and subsequent formation of the NRL.
After adding sides in Canberra and Illawarra in 1982, and in Brisbane, Newcastle and the Gold Coast in 1988, the NSWRL’s (New South Wales Rugby League) next move was to make the competition truly national.
In November 1992 the NSWRL announced an ambitious plan to admit four new clubs simultaneously in 1995. The new teams would be based in Auckland, Brisbane, Perth, and Townsville.
Going from 16 to 20 clubs at once was both visionary and misguided. A number of existing clubs were struggling financially, and expanding so quickly threatened to stretch finances too far and spread players too thinly. The cash-strapped Gold Coast would learn this the hard way after the new clubs raided the Seagulls’ playing stocks ahead of the 1995 season.
At the same time, dark clouds were beginning to gather over the game. After Kerry Packer’s Optus Vision secured the game’s television rights – a steal at just $1 million per season – Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited begun planning a breakaway competition to create broadcast product for its own Foxtel subscription service.
An internal News document in August 1994 outlined plans for the formation of a 12 team Australasian “superleague”. In the months to follow, News would offer unprecedented sums of money to entice players, clubs and administrators onboard, with a view to launching Super League in 1996.
Rugby league would spend as much time in courtrooms as on the field over the next few years, but there was still football to play, and the 1995 season got underway with the Cowboys, Crushers, Reds and Warriors joining the race for the Winfield Cup.
Placing a team in North Queensland to tap into league-mad locals had been a no brainer, but establishing a side in a city of 120,000 people came with its own challenges.
The Cowboys of the mid-90s weren’t the professional club that they are today, and money was tight, but the local community dig deep to make it happen. Foundation player Adrian Vowles later recalled to FOX Sports how even the players themselves had to pitch in.
(AAP Image/Andrew Cornaga /Photosport)
“One of our training sessions was to go out and lay the grass for the hill,” he said.
“(Cowboys player) Paul Galea, he built the gym with all the brickwork in there. Blokes were there helping with the paving”.
The Cowboys would only win two games on their way to the wooden spoon, but locals were undeterred. Despite winning only once at home, crowds averaged almost 22,000, with some fans making enormous round trips from Cairns or even Mt Isa to watch their side.
In Brisbane, the Crushers also struggled, winning six matches and finishing 16th. Nonetheless, by providing an alternative team for Brisbane league fans to support, and with well known players like Mario Fenech, Trevor Gillmeister and Dale Shearer, the Crushers still averaged crowds of over 21,000.
The Warriors were the best of the new sides, only missing the finals after being docked two competition points for an interchange breach. In their garish green, blue and red jerseys, the New Zealand side averaged the second-highest attendance figures in the competition.
Over 5,000 kilometres away in Perth, the Reds were the only new side to win their first game. 24,000 curious Western Australians watched a side boasting the likes of Brad Mackay and Michael Potter beat St George 28-16 at the WACA. They would win eight of their 11 home matches, and finish a respectable 11th on the ladder.
The Super League feud continued all year, with the Cowboys, Reds and Warriors aligning themselves with the rebel competition, along with the Bulldogs, Broncos, Panthers, Raiders and Sharks. Super League proposed introducing new sides in Adelaide and the Hunter Valley to round out the competition.
There would be no Super League, however. Not in 1996, anyway. The Australian Rugby League (ARL) had taken Super League to the Federal Court, which ruled in the ARL’s favour and blocked the breakaway competition from beginning before 2000.
In retaliation, the Super League clubs boycotted Round 1 of the ARL. Controversy would hang over the entire season, and weary fans would stay away in droves, with crowds down almost one-fifth.
The only expansion side not aligned with Super League was the Crushers. Super League did not want a cross-town rival to the News owned Broncos, leaving the Crushers to pin their hopes for survival on the ARL.
Without access to Super League’s rivers of gold, and with the local Murdoch papers championing the Broncos, the Crushers’ finances, crowds and results rapidly declined throughout 1996. After beating the Eels in Round 2, they would win just twice more, finishing the season last in front of increasingly smaller crowds.
The Reds too, were beginning to feel serious financial strain. The terms of their participation in the ARL meant paying for away team’s travel and accommodation costs. Only a sponsorship deal with the News Limited-owned Sunday Times kept them afloat. However, losing ten of their first 11 matches – including five of their first six at home – killed off the momentum from 1995.
The Warriors and Cowboys were more successful. The Warriors again challenged for the finals before a late season fade-out, while the Cowboys improved to win six matches and continued to attract strong crowds. There was even a memorable away win against the Dragons, grand finalists the previous year.
In October, News Limited won a court appeal which gave the green light for Super League to finally start in 1997. The game would be torn in half: ten teams would play in the Telstra sponsored Super League, leaving 12 ARL loyalists to contest the newly named Optus Cup.
The headline in Sydney’s Sun-Herald after the decision was ominous: ‘RIP Australian RL: Born 1908 Died 1996′.
A bit dramatic maybe, but it was the death knell for the Crushers. Only able to start the season after a mystery backer came forward with $500,000, the financially struggling side would finish last for the second year running. A flogging at the hands of Illawarra in front of just 2,364 fans at Lang Park in July summed it up. The club would close at the end of the year, owing the QRL $1.5 million.
At the same time as the Crushers were fading away, two brand new clubs were starting out. The launch of Super League include two new sides, the Adelaide Rams and Hunter Mariners.
Playing in an AFL mad city in the middle of the Super League war stacked the odds against the Rams. But the fourth largest crowd of any match all year – the grand final included – turned up at Adelaide Oval to see the Rams beat the Mariners in their first home game. Crowds would slip as the year wore on and the Crows marched towards a maiden AFL premiership, but the potential was clearly there.
Of all the new teams of the 90s, the one that seemed least viable from the outset was surely the Hunter Mariners. John Ribot, Super League chief executive, later revealed they only introduced the Mariners so the Knights didn’t have the region to themselves.
“The Hunter was put there strategically to show the Newcastle Knights we were not going to go away”, Ribot said.
It was not a solid basis for a football team, and parochial Novocastrians were never going to abandon the Knights. After the Knights won the ‘97 ARL grand final, 100,000 fans turned up at a ticker-tape parade to celebrate.
Meanwhile, about the only thing the Mariners won was the Super League wooden spoon. The unloved club struggled to attract fans, with crowds slipping as low as 1,900. They folded at the end of the year, but not before a run to the semi-finals of the World Club Challenge.
It was obvious the game could not continue split into two, and in December 1997 representatives from ARL-aligned clubs voted 36-4 in favour of a peace settlement to establish a new, reunified competition for 1998. The 20-team competition would be the NRL we know today.
With the Melbourne Storm entering the 1998 competition, three of the 22 existing clubs would have to make way. The unloved Mariners and bankrupt Crushers would be joined on the scrapheap with the Reds. Having been rebranded as the Perth Reds, the side had amassed debts of $10 million when they were wound up by News Limited.
The Rams would live on for one more season. Sadly, atrocious results, coaching dramas and a mid-season stadium move would decimate interest. It didn’t help that the Adelaide Crows, together with the city’s netball and basketball teams, would win championships in 1997 or 1998, hoovering up fans from the struggling Rams.
The Rams were officially put out of their misery in December. John Ribot has sinced revealed that of Adelaide, Perth and the Mariners, the Rams had come closest to profitability.
“The one which was closest to making a dollar was Adelaide”, he said. “We had a very parachoial one-team city. It was sad to see them go”.
In the centre of the AFL universe, the Storm put rugby league on the map, leading the competition for much of the season and eventually finishing third on the ladder.
Ironically, the Storm’s inaugural side was full of the ghosts of failed clubs. The likes of Scott Hill and Brett Kimmorley from the Mariners, together with Matt Geyer, Rodney Howe and Robbie Kearns from the Reds were all integral to the Storm’s success.
The Storm would win the premiership in their second season. This weekend they will challenge for their third. They are arguably the best side of the NRL era and and average higher crowds than any other team except the Broncos.
But get this: the Crushers, Reds, and Rams all averaged higher crowds than Melbourne in their respective first seasons. The Reds and Rams showed flourishes of competitiveness, and in the right circumstances all three could have become successful clubs.
In the end the timing was wrong and all three were saddled with being introduced into a bloated competition with the game was on the brink of civil war.
The respective failures of the Rams, Reds and Crushers have set back expansion clubs in Adelaide and Perth, together with a second Brisbane side, by at least two decades.
The game is poorer for it.
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