SCRUMTOWN

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 As far as explosive news articles are concerned, this one has to be right up there in terms of issues covered, news announced and the effects thereof. This is the front page of the Penrith Press – Tuesday, May 16, 1995. Penrith had just officially jumped across to “the Super League” and the proverbial had hit the fan. I remember as a kid being told by lots of adults to be very angry with the Panthers’ disgraceful decision, but sinking away into a corner later on, I’d be thinking – why, because our club would now be safe forever? I forgot, as this article screams, that the Super League jump would likely mean the club would likely now be called the Western Sydney Panthers going forward. Maybe I’d forgotten this was a thing because deep down at the time, I knew it wouldn’t ever really be a chance of happening. Which in the end, thankfully, it didn’t, and still hasn’t. The front page of the Penrith Press - Tuesday, May 16, 1995.  The new Super Stadium thing has a...

BY JAMES SMITH The Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs’ Steve Mortimer and the Parramatta Eels’ Peter Sterling were without doubt the two dominant halfbacks of the 1980s in Australia. Throughout that period, their teams were either in grand finals, had just played in them or were on their way towards yet another. Yes, they played behind two firesome packs of forwards and had magical outside backs whom helped make them look extra-clever, but regardless, these two legends were the dominant No.7s. It can be fun to look through old rugby league books and find out what players said about each other at the heights of their playing careers, so let’s do that. In chapter 10 of his 1998 book “Top Dog – The Steve Mortimer Story”, Turvey remembers playing against Sterlo long before either of them had cracked into the bigtime Sydney comp. The Covers of Peter Sterling's and Steve Mortimer's respective books, released back in the 1980s. “As far back as 1971, when I was playing with the Tu...

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 Like a lot of league people out there, I have an absolute trove of 1980s and 1990s rugby league books at home, which can be fun to explore in search for forgotten stories told by some of rugby league's most interesting characters. I have in my possession the holy trinity - for Balmain Tigers fans at least - that being books written by the great Wayne Pearce, Paul Sironen and "Backdoor" Benny Elias.  With the Australian national side currently in the UK taking on the rest of the planet in the latest iteration of the Rugby League World Cup, I got nosy and looked up each of our three legends' memories of being told they'd be donning the green and gold for the first time. In his 1990 book  Local Hero,  written with the help of the legendary Ian Heads, Balmain god Wayne "Junior" Pearce recalls doing things differently to most players as far as the selection food chain is concerned. "I became a Kangaroo, and then a Test player, before I had...

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...