One of Aussie league's most famous trophies up close

BY JAMES SMITH

This magnificent beast is the AMCO Cup trophy - the one our parents watched on TV being awarded to the winners of the original mid-week cup tournaments in Australia back in the 1970s.

These days it stands proudly at the Rugby League Museum at Rugby League Central at Moore Park.  

Just like in modern times, when it has tried to emulate the British game with concepts such as a "Magic Weekend", Aussie rugby league back in the '70s strove for its own prestigious knock-out event, in the tradition of the Challenge Cup and the like.  

As written about in Malcom Andrews' "The ABC of Rugby League", our officials had tried the City Cup and the State Cup, but these weren't taken seriously enough by the big Sydney teams, which meant the fans weren't going to be kept captive by them, either.

All this changed in 1974, when Amco teamed up with Channel 10 to sponsor the concept and the rest is history.

The Amco Cup trophy, as displayed at the Rugby League Museum in Sydney. 

This time things were going to be spiced up a bit. As Mr Andrews wrote, joining the usual line-up of established Sydney NSWRL clubs were teams repping country regions, teams from Brisbane, rep teams from regional Queensland, and even squads from New Zealand and PNG.

If you're reading this, you're likely a league tragic and know all about Western Division's glory in the tournament's first year in 1974. It doesn't really matter who they beat in the final (it was Penrith, 6-2).

The Amco Cup was made famous for other stuff too, like a wild brawl in 1976 involving about 20 players. So wrote Messrs Middleton and Heads in their amazing "Centenary of Rugby League" work of art, Newtown and Norths players went at it hammer and tong, with an audience of over a million people watching it on TV.

Norths' John Gray scored the not-very-coveted man of the match/player cited double (Newtown's Ron Turner and Peter Johnson were also cited) with ref Col Turner, according to Middo and Ian Heads, also sending three players (Mark Wright and Paul Hayward for Newtown and Norths' Neville Makin) from the field.

As wrote Middleton and Heads, this was the first ever rugby league game for which video evidence was used to highlight incidents of foul play and then cite players to answer charges.

  

Popular posts from this blog

Demolition Derby at end of 1986 Kangaroo Tour

Image
BY JAMES SMITH How would something like this go down with the media and image-managers today, you reckon? Brett Cochrane’s two magnificent photo essays of the 1986 and 1990 Kangaroos Tours, which he made into the books "Mud Sweat And Cheers” and “Twenty Eight Heroes” respectively, contain some of the most dramatic and haunting rugby league-related images ever captured. But for silliness and tomfoolery and mug lairness-capturing, this spread of shots will never be beaten.  That’s Royce Simmons pretending to have been caught in the middle of a two-car prang on the ’86 Tour, and that’s Gene Miles looking on and Wally Lewis in the background shots. Scenes from Brett Cochrane's book "Mud, Sweat And Cheers".   Brett’s caption reads “a demolition derby at the end of the tour was the novel means by which players disposed of their cars”.  This checks out. I went looking for evidence of a Kangaroos “demolition derby” (which, incidentally, my Dead In Goal podcast partner Jeff C...
Read more

What rugby league looked like back in 2002

Image
BY JAMES SMITH This magnificent beast is the official 2002 Rugby League Album, as issued by The Daily and Sunday Telegraphs two decades ago. Not exactly considered retro yet by any stretch, it is still a fantastic time capsule, and an interesting look back at who was gracing the fields of the NRL in just fifth season since the ARL and Super League got back together to form a unified competition. The papers would have released a coupon or token of some sort so that you could score the folder initially, along with a starter set of cards, and then the reader (in this case, your author's dad) had to wait patiently as each player in the set was available to pick up at your local servo or newsagent. The 2002 Rugby League Album, as published by The Daily and Sunday Telegraphs.  As you can see, and speaking of things unified, this folder contains representatives from the great Northern Eagles, who were in action 20 years ago. There were some truly horrific NRL logos back in the day -...
Read more

Footy emblem cards the greatest prize of all

Image
BY JAMES SMITH In the playground back in the olden days, forget money - these pieces of cardboard with pictures of footy players on one side and a bunch of stats on the back and quirky quotes where what really made the school yard tick at recess and lunch. Occasionally you’d come across somebody who knew someone else, whose older brother had almost collected an entire set of these distracting pieces of memorabilia.   Mostly though it was left to us mere mortals to try to collect as many as possible before either the footy season ended, or your school banned them because they were, as said, proving too distracting.   Not sure how popular they are with kids today, but the banning of footy cards at schools actually happened. Imagine having that problem as a sporting code; trading cards featuring your game are that distracting that they are taken off kids. Amazing.     Rugby league club emblem cards from the late 1980s.   The cards featured in the image in this arti...
Read more