SCRUMTOWN

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 -...

BY JAMES SMITH Remember this absolute beauty?  Back in the days before the NRL app, about the only ways rugby league fans were able to send to run their eyes over the season draw and analyse their team's opponents was either via a giant wall chart from a newspaper, in the weekly Big League magazine or the Friday rugby league lift-out in the dailies ahead of the weekend.  Or there was the Winfield Cup season fixture card, of course! From very shoddy memory, these things were available everywhere, from inside newspapers, at servos, post offices and fish 'n' chip shops.  Never be left wondering who your team is playing ever again ... How it worked was, a yellow card with the season draw on it slid through .... you can probably work it all out for yourself judging by the pictures.  What it all meant was you could carry around the season draw in your wallet or purse or back pocket. This particular version of the Winfield Cup fixture card would have been the last of its ki...

Back in the days before players shared their man of the match winnings with their cheeky team-mates at kick-on drinks after a win, the best player of the afternoon scored for themselves this beautiful thing.   It was the NEC Big Game Ball Trophy. Now, we're not sure if they quickly dipped one of the match balls in gold straight after the siren and by the time Graeme Hughes had wondered over to you for a post-game chat to present the game ball to you it was ready to go ...   Maybe they pre-made a bunch of trophies and just handed them out as the season wore on ... or maybe they just used the same one each week as a TV prop ...   As advertised in Big League magazine in the mid-80s.  Or what viewers at home saw of it ... from memory it was an hour-long highlights package which aired two hours after the game had been played.  Your author remembers some dag calculating, including ads, that we only got to see 43 minutes of actual game time.  People weren't happy ...

BY JAMES SMITH Long before the days of Team List Tuesdays, during which the fan base doesn’t believe the line-ups released by the current coaches anyway, we had “Big League on sale Thursdays”. If you wanted to know who was playing footy for whom at the weekend, you never knew until you consulted the Big League - until, from about the late ‘90s from memory, the papers began listing the teams on Wednesdays, cutting the grass of the official publication of the NSWRL. The magnificent work of art pictured below was filled in within the pages of the Round 24, 1986 edition of the great mag. You can tell this person did this every week. All the detail is there: players who were replaced or who had switched jersey numbers, tryscorers, penalty kickers, the penalty count, scrums … it’s beautiful. The Big League, long before Team List Tuesdays ruined all the fun ... And look at those extended benches – such a naming of fellows these days would send the Twitterverse into absolute meltdown …...

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...

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 Le...

BY JAMES SMITH  A terrific Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks team photo appeared in a 1986 edition of Big League magazine, which was the official publication of the NSWRL at the time. This team pin-up, as team posters were called back then, featured in a late-season edition of the magazine. The players, trainers and coaches sat for what must have been a lightning-fast team photo, with a beautiful but fierce storm appearing to fil the backdrop of the final team shot. It’s a fantastic image, and one very representative of the way things were done in even elite-level rugby league in Sydney in the mid-1980s. The front row of players doesn’t seem to have been offered chairs and instead, sat cross-legged on the playing surface of the then-named Ronson Field. Perhaps this had something to do with the speed at which that storm must have been moving - not enough time to set-up chairs, let’s get on with it! The Cronulla Sutherland Sharks on team photo day in 1986, as they appeared in Big Leagu...