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When I was in year three at primary school, the class was given a map of Sydney Harbour. There were the usual Sydney icons marked on the sheet: Harbour Bridge, The Rocks, Opera House – and then a strange one right in the middle of the water labelled ‘Fort Denison’.
“That can’t be a fort,” I remarked to my friend Angelo (the token Italian kid in our grade at Guildford West).
“Why not?” he replied. “It’s marked on the map.”
“It’s in the middle of the harbour!” I said, incredulous. “A fort is like a castle. It has to be made of timber or stone – they can’t just put one right there.”
“Well I’m just going to leave it – we’ll colour blue around it.”
Indignant, with self-belief bordering on hubris, I declared I wouldn’t leave it as it was.
“There must be mistake on the sheet. I’m going to fix it. Since there can’t possibly be a fort in the middle of the harbour, they must have meant to type a ‘P’ for ‘port’… or maybe it hasn’t photocopied properly.
“Either way it’s wrong, because it clearly should be ‘Port Denison’ – now that makes sense! Give me your sheet, I’ll fix yours too.”
And with that both Angelo’s page and mine were ‘corrected’ to read ‘Port Denison’.
How those wretched prisoners housed on ‘Pinchgut’ almost two centuries previously must have been rolling in their graves at the sight of a know-it-all eight-year-old changing the name of the island.
The teacher rightly hauled me over the coals, but what if she had known what was to happen to Parramatta’s first-grade team in 2016 when their own ‘F’ became a ‘P’?
Kieran Foran is a fort of his own. Since his debut in 2009, the he has built a reputation in the Manly and New Zealand teams as being tough, cool-headed and professional.
When Parramatta signed him in mid-2015 for this year and 2017, with an additional two-year option, the Eels were signing not just a champion half, but a brand. He’s a brand with whom the club can rise, like a swollen Parramatta River above the weir during flood.
Yet the question for me was always whether Foran could maintain his standards after he moved out of the northern peninsula.
Plenty of high-class players have signed with Parramatta over the last decade only to lower their standards to those around them. Chris Sandow, William Hopoate and Anthony Watmough were in career-best form before they landed at O’Connell Street.
I can’t blame them – eight coaches from 2006 to 2014, constant boardroom upheavals, and the more recent salary cap accusations have made life for new recruits far from settled.
For the outsider looking in, it seemed to be easier for the new players to accept what was around them and conform to what they saw. Instead of raising the standards, the status quo was maintained.
Enter Keiran Foran.
Round 4 showed the first sign that he is not prepared to accept what Parramatta has been displaying on the playing field in recent years.
Late in the second half of the Easter Monday game against the Wests Tigers, Parramatta found themselves in the Tigers’ half after the fifth play-the-ball. Eels hooker Isaac de Gois took the ball out of dummy half and ran away from his markers before passing to Foran, giving him little time to kick or set up a shift play to the edge.
Foran blew up at his teammate and the moment was not lost on the Triple M NRL team of Peter Sterling, Andrew Johns and Dan Ginane.
“That’s exactly what you don’t want on the last tackle,” Johns described. “You need a crisp pass from dummy half, not any time wasted.”
In the post-match interview, Foran was asked about the exchange and typically laughed it off. He talked about how important the metres are out of the ruck and how de Gois so often provides them.
Except not this time – not when Foran needed the ball. This is the standard expected at the Foran-led Parramatta, not any less.
That is a professional rugby league attitude. That is a player carved out of the remorseless Manly-Warringah system created by Des Hasler and chiselled by Geoff Toovey.
Foran has shown to me in three games – culminating in the Round 4 spray – that he is prepared to lift the Eels to where he stands and not slump to where they sit. He is uncompromising and if that professionalism can somehow permeate the rest of the organisation, from the board to the junior league, Parramatta might be looking around the corner to new levels that haven’t been achieved since 2001.
Through its history, Fort Denison has seen plenty come and go, from the indigenous Eora people to the British settlers and now today’s international tourists.
Could it now witness a New Zealander’s ultimate influence on rugby league from the Harbour’s northern point to its far reaches in the west?
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