Tumbarumba was another place where only the tough survived. My wife Pam would come to all the games, and every time we went to Tumbarumba I would warn her to be careful on the sideline, where supporters had been known to clean up rivals with umbrellas and the like. Our front row included international Kevin Brown, of St George fame. Kevin was a very solid player who was intimidated by nobody. He had been a previous coach of the Magpies and knew every trick that the local competition required.The Tumbarumba ground had a big slope to one corner, and Kevin’s advice was to watch out if you found yourself in that corner, because the locals saw it as some sort of killing field.
At one stage we were trying to run it from our line at that end of the field and getting nowhere. Kevin said ‘give me the ball’ and ran straight at their most notorious forward, Brian ‘Eccles’ McPherson. Just as McPherson lined up the tackle, Kevin dropped his head. The swinging arm that might have caught Brown on the chin thus caught the top of his head, breaking McPherson’s hand. McPherson appealed plaintively to referee Jack Jewell, who penalised Brown for ‘over-vigorous play’. They kicked the goal. When I complained to Jewell later, he gave me the unarguable line that has been the defence of stressed referees everywhere. ‘Mate,’ he said with resignation, ‘I’ve got to be able to get out of town.’
The referee who got most of the better games in the Riverina in those days was a Neville Hand, a former player of such standard that he had made a Kangaroo tour. We always thought he got the nod as a referee mainly for his entertainment value. He blew his whistle as if he was performing a minor symphony, and had the sort of flamboyance that made him as much of a spectacle as the game. Some of us thought he was the worst referee in the Riverina, but there was no questioning his passion. On one occasion, when we were playing Gundagai in a Maher Cup Challenge, Neville was the referee, and his son David was quite a worthy player in the second row for the Gundagai team. They kicked off short, and the ball went nowhere near the required ten yards. Young David Hand charged on to it as we all hesitated for the restart that was surely to be ordered. David took off and his old man took off with him, and they were well under way before we regrouped sufficiently to give chase. Neville Hand couldn’t help himself. ‘Go, son!’ he yelled at his boy as they careered down the sideline, ‘go son, go son, go!’ Country football had charms you would find nowhere else.
Towards the end of my time at the Magpies, we ran into a young halfback playing for the Wagga Kangaroos who quickly made clear that he had a big future ahead of him. Tom Raudonikis was eighteen when I first ran into him. He was at the RAAF base in Wagga, and the then Kangaroos coach Graham Kennedy was the first to see his potential when he pulled him out of the Junee under-18s. Tommy was a cheeky kid who I think changed tyres on the aeroplanes, although he told everybody he was a pilot. The thing he was very good at right from the start was playing Rugby League. As was the practice of the time, I tried to give him a good sorting out the first time I played him. I caught him hard in a tackle and made sure I gave him a good whack on the way down. He jumped up and got stuck into me like a whirling dervish. So much for testing him out. I stayed well away from him after that.
After the game I remarked to Kennedy what a composed young kid he was. Kennedy told me he had had a talk with Raudonikis before the game about playing against me. ‘Summons is past his best,’ Kennedy had said. ‘But he is cagey, and you’d better watch him.’ Tommy replied in a flash. ‘Bugger that,’ he said. ‘He can watch me.’ That’s about how it turned out, too. Not long after that I had a call from Wests, looking for advice on whether Raudonikis would make it in the city. ‘Grab him,’ I told them. ‘He’s a beauty.’ I think my biggest motivation in recommending him highly was just to get him out of town. The last thing I needed was to be shown up and belted up by a young bloke of Tommy’s capabilities in my twilight years in the game. I was not surprised when he became Australia’s halfback, and one of the great characters of the Australian game.
My five years as captain–coach of the Wagga Magpies, and the years of country coaching that followed, were great fun and hugely rewarding in terms of the sense of achievement they brought. Country football was very vibrant in those days. Crowds of 10 000 for a club game at Eric Weissel Oval, which adjoined the leagues club, were commonplace. The junior organisation was strong, and there were hundreds of kids involved, providing an enormous base for the three senior clubs that existed in Wagga. The other towns that made up Group 20 were equally dynamic, with a large volunteer base to run things and a spirit that enveloped whole communities.
In a sociological sense, Rugby League was a central contributor to the lifestyle of country towns. It provided social cohesion and a sense of well-being for people who saw sport as a vital diversion from the routines of rural life. This was never more in evidence than at the Wagga leagues club. In my time there it was the centre of social activity in the town. After games it throbbed to the energy and the spirit of not just the footy tribes, who were glued-on supporters, but to the populus as a whole, who saw the sport and the club as a symbol of the town’s identity.
The Magpies had offered me the job of leagues club general manager as a sweetener to get me to play football with the club. But it was a more important job than I think they realised, and I stuck at it for 30 years. It was a good time to be involved. The club was growing in size and importance, and a series of renovation programs built it into Wagga’s premier entertainment venue. The field was virtually at the back door, and that too was the premier sporting venue in Wagga for all the time that I was involved. For me personally, running the club was no easy thing. While I was still playing, the two jobs left me no time at all to do much else. But even when my active playing days were over, the demands of the club were heavy. It was early starts and late finishes, and everybody seemed to have a call on me. The administrative work was one thing, but the social work was another. My wife Pam said I should have said ‘no’ more often and made myself scarce, but it was not that sort of place. If the members wanted to yarn, a culture had been established that said you had to stop and yarn, and that involved more drinking and more of my time than was sensible.
I had grown up in an environment where alcohol had more influence on our way of life than it should have. My old man was a gentle soul who loved us and would not harm a hair on our head. But he loved a drink, and he consumed more than was good for either our household economy or our long-suffering mother. It was an almost daily ritual that he would have a session at the pub after work, come home, fall asleep, and we would virtually have to put him to bed. It was hard on Mum, since a lot of things he should have been doing just didn’t get done. It was a lesson for me, too, about the dangers of drink, and there were times in my tenure at the leagues club when I didn’t keep those lessons front of mind. I was no drunk, but I spent too much time in the place, and it was not fair to my wife and family.
When I decided I had worked long enough at the club and resigned in 1994, I had been three decades in the job. They were successful years.The club made good money and the football club it supported was very healthy. It helped out with our rival clubs, too. But political waywardness is never far away in club life, and in the case of the Wagga Leagues club and the Magpies football club it proved critically so. There had been a long history of rivalry between the Magpies and the Wagga Kangaroos, and some angst it seems, because, as the Magpies record of events suggested, the Kangaroos did not want to kick in when the licensed club was being launched in the first place. The Magpies set it up anyway, and made a rule in their constitution that effectively shut out Kangaroos football club members from full involvement in leagues club affairs. Such was the entrenched bitterness among the original members of the club that they stuck with that through thick and thin, despite pleas from the president Arthur Dixon and myself—even when business started to shrink and it became obvious that getting all of Wagga’s Rugby League community involved was the only thing that would save the club.
By 2004 the club was
broke, seriously in debt, and in no shape to continue. The directors had never come to terms with the fact that being a footy club would never make ends meet on its own, and that the football focus was in fact a deterrent to a wider market that would have helped the club survive. It wasn’t long before the footy club failed, and today the Magpies are a piece of Wagga history, lamented by some but forgotten by many. The club and the ground were sold to a local developer for a song. The old leagues club building now houses a child-care centre and other welfare organisations, and the Eric Weissel Oval, which saw so many great battles and so many champions over so many years, lies derelict. The three Wagga clubs have now shrunk to two, Aussie Rules has grown in leaps and bounds and is now the main sporting focus of the town, and the Aussie Rules social club has the high ground that the Wagga Leagues Club once held.
The Wagga experience is not unique in country Rugby League. Changes in society are part of it. Volunteers are harder to find in a world that is time poor. Sport in schools has suffered at the hands of worried mothers, feminisation of the teaching profession and cultural diversity, as well as a general trend among teachers to avoid sport as an extracurricular activity. But in the case of country football specifically, there has also been a certain neglect on the part of the Rugby League game itself. I once offered a public critique of how the league sees country football as not much more than a conveyor belt of good players for Sydney clubs. I was carpeted by the NSW League for that, and told such matters were not my concern. I think I was Country coach at the time, which they clearly considered gave them the right to shape my opinions. When the Magpies were on the rocks, neither the local council nor the league saw any benefit in trying to shore them up. It is a scenario being repeated all over the bush, and a great Rugby League resource is waning because of it. If the new Rugby League commission wanted to do something that would give the grass roots a fillip, there would be no better place to start than NSW Country.
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RULES AND OTHER DISASTERS
RUGBY LEAGUE HAS ALWAYS been quick on its feet when it comes to amending the laws of the game to suit prevailing circumstances. The strength of the game in Australia means it can move independently, and over time it has been very good at taking the initiative, making the changes it deems necessary, and leaving the rest of the league world to follow. The evolution of the game has seen much change. Limited tackles, replacements, interchange, three-metre rules, five-metre rules, ten-metre rules, contestable scrums, non-contestable scrums . . . the list goes on. And each of the changes has had such effect on the game that in many respects it is no longer recognisable as the game Norm Provan and Arthur Summons played. It is a fair bet the evolution will continue, and the laws will continue to move in concert with modern demands. Both Provan and Summons have watched this process over half a century, and they are not short of ideas as to how it should continue.
NORM PROVAN
These days I mostly see football via the television. We have the big screen and high definition and the benefits of multiple cameras and a myriad of replay angles that the marvels of modern technology provide. But I get frustrated because for much of the time I can’t see what’s happening. Everything seems geared to capturing the confrontation. Close-ups of the hits and facial expressions dominate, as do grim looks on the face of the coach. But there are never enough wide shots of just what is happening on the field. I see people put their head down and charge, but I have no idea whether that was the right thing to do since I can’t see what space there is outside them, or where the defence is lined up.Television has its obvious benefits and its convenience, but it also has its limitations. In the end that is good for the game, I suppose, because there is no substitute for being there.
If I balance what I see on the TV and what I see in the live games I do get to, there are some rules that I think are pushing the game in the wrong direction. For starters, I get very annoyed with the long delays and the continued angst about deciding whether the ball has been grounded for a try. This has been a big issue in recent seasons, when it has several times been obvious that not even the referee watching endless replays can get it right all the time. My solution would be to do away with the need to ground the ball. The touchdown in American football doesn’t require any touching down at all, and I can’t see why that wouldn’t work in Rugby League. Once you’re over the line that’s good enough, and that would save all those arguments.
In my time, when unlimited tackles were in play, people accused St George of dominating a ‘bash and barge’ game, and they brought in limited tackles to counter that. But I would wager that the game today has more bash and barge than there was in my day. Everything is very patterned. A prescribed number of hit-ups, then a pass to deep runners, then a kick to the wing. There are a number of reasons for this predictability in the game, regarding which a tweak in the laws would prove an advantage. One reason is that coaches have worked out so many ways to slow things down at the tackle that defences have all the time in the world to organise. Wrestling should be barred. The holds employed to get ball-runners on to their back shouldn’t be a part of Rugby League, which is supposed to be a running and passing game. There should also be a limit in the number of people allowed in a tackle. Two is plenty. The numbers employed these days are not to stop the ball-runner’s progress, but rather to delay the play-the-ball, which is a real negative and leads to dull football. Get rid of the wrestling, limit the tacklers, and suddenly everything moves more quickly, with a consequent lift in imagination and enterprise.
The distance that a defence is required to stand back is another subject worthy of more debate. It used to be three yards. Then it went to five. Now it is up to ten metres. The reason they did that was to get defences out of the way a bit and allow more running. But it has had the opposite effect. The temptation for big forwards to ‘hit it up’ at the first or second pass is so strong when there is an inviting space in front of them. Under the old system you couldn’t do that. So the ball moved quickly and backs came into play a hell of a lot more than they do today. Because of that there was a lot more alertness and spontaneity as supports looked for opportunities. Today there seems to be an assumption on the early tackles that the ball will merely be taken forward by somebody whose physicality is his prime asset. Everybody else relaxes and waits for some other time.
The lack of legitimate contest at both the scrum and the play-the-ball has added to the predictability of the modern game, but I agree this is much harder to correct. The original intent of the game was to provide an equal chance to gather possession for each team at every breakdown, which meant every scrum and every play-the-ball. But the two-man ruck and the flailing feet at the scrum got out of hand, and the lawmakers took the soft option of the ‘anything goes’ system that applies today. It does away with much of the skill that we needed to apply in our day, but given modern scrutiny, modern levels of fitness, and the modern need to bow to the entertainment needs of television, I regret to say I am short of a solution. If the game, the contest, was the only consideration in the age of corporate sport, I’d say bring back the scrum and let the defender have a lash in the play-the-ball. But I can’t see that happening.
ARTHUR SUMMONS
My biggest beef with some of the laws of the game today is not necessarily the laws themselves but the way they are interpreted and applied. There seems to be a ‘gotcha’ mentality within the refereeing fraternity and those that set their standards, made worse since two referees have been on the field to control games. The rule seems to be to accentuate the negative and eliminate the positive, so that defence is seen as the central element of the game and the real stars—those who run and connive looking for breaks—have a wall of pedantic resistance to climb. Take the modern emphasis on obstruction, or shepherding as we used to call it. Here is a classic example of a timeless skill almost killed off by referees who give the benefit of the doubt to defending teams ahead of the attacking team at virtually every call.
You know the ro
utine. An attacking player with the ball takes off, and so do some of his team-mates, working angles and timing their run so that defenders are deceived into thinking a decoy runner is their big danger. Or maybe two decoy runners. The principal motivation here is deception. The more successful the deception, however, the more likely a modern referee, operating under modern instruction, will penalise the attacking side. I would have thought that the optimum result for this sort of attacking ploy is to so bamboozle defenders that they actually run in to tackle the wrong man. Yet today we get so many defenders who are happy to do that, claim obstruction, and lap up the penalty that the referee is all too ready to award. A simple case of good play penalised and poor defence rewarded. Surely the obvious answer in these cases is to have the referees give the benefit of the doubt to the attacking team and try to understand what they are doing. The emphasis as it is seems to be on trying to find ways to stop tries rather than supporting the sort of play that produces them.
I agree with Norm Provan that there are too many men in the modern tackle, and the only reason they are all there is to slow everything down. Three or four in the tackle, as often happens, is a time-wasting tactic, but when you couple it with the sort of wrestle holds that are involved, it is also downright dangerous. We used to cop the odd whack in the mouth in our day, but there was no ‘chicken wing’ tackle, or the tactic of aiming at vulnerable knees. Limiting the number of people in the tackle would eradicate a lot of this. It is true that the predictability of the modern game has opened up new areas of skill that simply weren’t required very much when I was playing. One of these is the accurate kick to the corner and the aerial leap that wingers today seem to look upon as the most vital weapon in their armoury. It has changed the nature of team building. A little scooter like Kenny Irvine, who in his time was perhaps the fastest runner in the country, would not measure up today in the aerial contest that wing play has become.
The Gladiators Page 21