Almanac (Rugby League) Life: At Leichhardt

 

 

 

 

 

At Leichhardt.

by Paul Harman

 

I’m standing outside the ground in front of the Keith Barnes stand. The writing on the top of the grandstand reads: Leichhardt Oval est. 1934. The letters have been given a fresh lick of black paint and stand out in front of the white planks of wood that it’s written on. The game is hours away, a Sunday twilight match, and I’m here early, waiting for my sister. There are others around me, standing in the shade, hiding from the hot afternoon Autumn sun, and like me, they are waiting to catch up with friends or family before heading into the ground. We were last here four years back in 2019, my sister flew down for the day, I paid for general admission for the both of us, printed the tickets at home, then I bought a West Tigers bucket hat and a cap for both of us when we were shepherded into the merchandise stand after we entered the ground at the main entrance in Mary Street. When we sat in our usual spots in the free seats in the pocket of the ground at the Parramatta River end of the oval, we took a selfie to send to our mother. Both of us looked ridiculous with our wide smiles, our hats and caps that were too small and sat loosely on the top of our heads. It was then that my sister conspiratorially revealed to me with a touch of sibling glee that it was cheaper to buy a return flight to the Gold Coast than it was to pay for two general admission tickets and two hats. She’s never let me forget it. On that day, on the opening round of the season in 2019, the Tigers had an easy win against Manly, and my bucket hat, to commemorate a day at the footy rests on top of one of my bookcases at home, a reminder of an always great day at Leichhardt with my sister, a reminder that the right flights can be ridiculously cheap, and that merchandise stalls have been ripping off mankind since the dawn of time.

Four years ago.

Before Covid and lockdowns.

We’re back again for the opening round of the 2023 season. I read the NRL draw when it came out late in 2022. Round 1 had the Tigers playing the Titans at Leichhardt. I messaged my sister to see if we should make a day of it. ‘I’m in,’ was her reply. ‘Remind me in the lead up.’

In the new year I booked the tickets, Melinda booked her airfare, she flew down on the Saturday, caught up with friends in Sydney, is getting a lift to the ground and is probably caught up somewhere in one of Sydney’s famous traffic snarls.

An early game has just started, and the referee’s whistle can be heard outside the oval as he blows a penalty. There is small and scattered applause around the oval from the few supporters that are already in the ground. Usually I arrived early enough to grab a parking spot a couple of hundred metres up the road from the oval. There is a strip of parking with the space for about 15 cars in Glover Street that doesn’t require a residential permit, but I got the feeling before I left home that the spots would be long filled, so I drove down from the Blue Mountains, parked at Petersham and took the light rail. I hopped off at North Leichhardt and walked the ten minutes to the ground. Being four hours early before the main game starts affords you time, so I detoured down Glover Street to see if my hunch was right. I was. Cars were sandwiched together in the free parking area, too tight almost to walk between them. I walked past security officers, standing in front of orange crowd barriers in Mary Street who were directing oncoming traffic away from the oval. I stood outside the oval, fidgeting, resisting the urge to ring my sister to see how far away she was. Watching the crowd arrive and enter the ground, I felt we should have been here earlier so we could grab our favourite seats. My sister is more laid back and she caters to my anxieties by agreeing to arrive so early. It’s always a wasted panic on my behalf. We always sit where we want to and never have a problem finding a seat. The crowds at most NRL games, even with the curtain raisers games of the Jersey Flegg and Under 20s games to entertain them, notoriously file in a few minutes before kick-off.

I hear a voice; someone calls my name. I turn and my sister Melinda is behind me. We hug. No matter how long it’s been since we last saw each other, it’s always a long overdue reunion. I pull my tickets from my pocket, and in my backpack amongst my sandwiches and water is my souvenir from our last visit – the West Tigers bucket hat. It has shrunk with a recent wash and dry, and it sits so loosely on my head it looks ready to fall off with the first step I take.

‘Did you bring yours?’ I ask Melinda.

‘What do you think?’

Melinda pulls her cap from her purse, and on her head it goes. We look just as ridiculous as the last time we wore them. We smile and laugh.

‘Were your plane tickets as cheap as they were the last time?’ I ask her.

‘They were not.’

‘Ha! You ready?’ I ask her.

‘Let’s go.’

My bag is listlessly searched on the trestle table outside the gate, our tickets are scanned, and once inside we walk past the Keith Barnes Stand, past already forming queues in front of the coffee cart, then we walk along the concourse in front of the Norm Robinson Stand, through a wire gate into the general admission area, and we sit where we sat the last time we were here. Rows of wooden seats have been painted black and orange, and we sit in one of the seats closest to the stand in the shadows. The goalposts are to our left, behind us are huge fig trees running the width of the ground, on our right is the main stand, and on the other side of the ground is the hill that spans the length of the oval. The sun is out, it’s a cloudless sky, a slight breeze blows across my face. The ball is kicked by the half back into touch after the last tackle, and when the touchie waves his flag twenty metres in front of me, I hear the flag flap in the breeze. Kids are playing catch with rugby balls on the almost empty hill, though in a few hours it will be packed enough you won’t be able to move, let alone throw anything. I can see other early arrivals rushing from the gate hurrying to their favourite spots. I’m not the only one who likes getting to games early.

A caravan that serves drinks to our right has just rolled its shutter doors up and is open for business. My sister pounces.

‘Would you like a wine, brother?’ she asks me as she reaches for her purse.

‘Yes please.’ She waves off my half-hearted attempt to reach for my wallet and wanders off through the wire gate back towards the grandstand.

There are 35 grounds the NRL will use for the 2023 season, the rugby league carnival stretches from Auckland to Perth and from Melbourne to Darwin, but there’s no finer venue than Leichhardt. It’s a one-of-a-kind oval. Everything is tiny and cramped together, and when it’s full, it’s like elephants squeezing into a telephone booth. If you’re standing at the back of the hill, or you’re sitting in the last row of the grandstand, you still feel like you’re on top of the action.

It’s the most historic, antiquated and oldest of all the grounds in the NRL. It was one of the first grounds to have lights installed and held night competitions and held the original State of Origin games. For much of its existence, the oval ran east-west, then the oval was reconfigured to run north-south. How hard is it to just change the direction of the ground? Not that hard, apparently. The only evidence that the ground ran the other way is that the Keith Barnes stand runs crooked to the current oval. It was on the wing of the old ground, and housed the change rooms until the new stand was built. You wouldn’t know it to look at it that the oval ran in another direction. The ground looks like it hasn’t changed in a century. The grass on the oval is lush and the lines are freshly marked, the wooden scoreboard stands next to a bar at the top of the hill, and rows of members seats by the ground cover both wings and all look as old and ancient as pyramids. Radio icons, Rampaging Roy Slaven and HG Nelson, on their weekly midday show dedicated to the greatest game of all, ‘Bludging on the Blindside,’ believe that the men’s and female’s toilets under the Robinson stand should be heritage-listed, put on the back of a truck and hauled around the nation for a country wide tour, so all Australian’s can have the pleasure of seeing them.

There are only three games a year played at Leichhardt and it’s always a sell out when games are held there. In the last few years of Balmain’s existence, not many went to matches at Leichhardt. Rats desert merging ships. There were seven games at Leichhardt when they amalgamated with Western Suburbs in 2000, and it’s been whittled down over the years to four as they split their home games across three venues between Campbelltown, Parramatta and Leichhardt. Now they’ve taken one of the Leichhardt home games on the road to regional NSW. Tiger officials always tell their fans they love coming back to the spiritual Tiger home of Leichhardt, but don’t mind transferring one of their games to the bush if the price is right.

One day it will all be changed. The Government will chip in some money, the ground will be upgraded, the seats we sit on will be demolished, the trees at the back of the ground near the river will be dug up, and in its place behind the goal posts they’ll build a brand-new Centre of Excellence above a new and shiny stand that will alter the whole character of the oval. Or they’ll put extra seating on the hill, or they’ll build proper kiosk facilities instead of the slapdash carts and caravans they use so you don’t have to wait half a game to get served. One of the charms of waiting in line for a hot dog or a beer at Leichhardt is that the food kiosks and bars are so close to the action you can watch the game while you’re standing in line. Leichhardt Oval deserves all the upgrades, all the new construction to bring it into the 21^st century, but I’ll howl with anguish and despair when it happens. Is it okay to say you barrack for a football ground instead of a team? That’s how I feel about Leichhardt.

Melinda arrives with the wines, sits back down next to me.

‘Cheers.’

I point my fingers and wave my arms and tell her about how they changed direction of the oval. She seems impressed with my history lesson. I test her skills and ask her why they did it. I point to the hill, and the spectators who are watching the game and are shielding their eyes from the sun as a hint. She thinks for a minute, then her face sparks with knowledge.

‘The sun,’ she says. ‘The players were running into the sun.’

‘Correct,’ I tell her. When the ground ran east- west, the players would run straight into the sun. I tell Melinda my sources revealed to me that players couldn’t see where they were going, and sometimes they would collide with the goal posts as they were diving over for a try.

‘Sources?’ my sister arcs her eyebrow. ‘What sources?’ she asks me with the derision and contempt that only a middle child could ask of her eldest sibling. She sees through my bullshit.

‘Online sources,’ I reply with a wicked grin.

‘Rightio.’

We gossip and catch up about what’s been happening. The pandemic brought challenges, but apart from the obstacles of the first lockdown and a Christmas border closure 18 months later, it hasn’t interrupted us catching up. I fly or drive up a few times a year to catch up with my family.

I’ve been harping with mum at her home on the Gold Coast to get a fence built in her front yard to stop the kids from the units next door climbing her trees. She always fobbed me off, saying she likes hearing the playful joy in the voices of the children. Melinda informs me that one man from the other block of flats on the other side runs across her front yard all the time and runs through the yard a lot closer than the kids that climb the trees, and one recent morning, a naked woman was staring at her through the kitchen window.

‘Did mum tell you about that?’ Melinda asks me.

‘Nope. She’d know I’d nag her to get a fence.’

Melinda shows me an old school photo on her phone of when we were young. She came across it in one of her albums at her home in Tugun and took a screenshot of it to show me. Mum took a picture of us in the driveway of our Melbourne home decades back. it’s a school morning, I’m dressed in my high school brown denim jeans and woollen jumper, Melinda in her green smock and yellow top. Our younger brother hadn’t started school, but had his hair combed for the photo, was wearing a Humphrey B. Bear t-shirt, and was holding his lunch box he took to kindergarten.

‘The colours of the uniforms, brother. What were they thinking?’ she says before she trots off to gets more wines.

When Melinda returns, the photo starts us reminiscing of our childhood years.

When we would go on holidays from Melbourne to the Gold Coast with our father to visit our grandparents, he would sit in the front of the plane in the smoking area, and Melinda and I were siphoned off to the non-smoking back rows. We sat next to a stranger for a couple of hours, just so the old man could puff away on his cigarettes. I used to look down from the window seat to the window seats in front of me, and I could recognise his arm by the watch he was wearing as he butted his cigarettes into the ashtray built into the armchair.

One time, he took us on a train trip from Melbourne to the Gold Coast. Melinda tells me she was diagnosed with mumps before we left, but we went anyway. We spent a day in Sydney, hanging around the city, visiting the Opera House and walking along Circular Quay admiring he views of the harbour. The conductor accused one of us on the leg from Sydney to Murwillumbah of breaking a lock on one of our doors, and Melinda told me our father nearly got into a fight defending us. When the train terminated at Murwillumbah, our grandparents were supposed to meet us, but were nowhere to be seen. After looking up and down the platform searching for his parents, my father asked the station guard where the nearest pub was. Ten minutes later we were sipping on raspberries at the Riverview Hotel.

I don’t remember my sister having the mumps, or an argumentative conductor, or absent grandparents. I remember lying in the top bunk of our sleeper cabin, with my brother below, looking out from my bed to the night and the stars as the countryside rolled by. The repetitive soothing noises of the click clacking of the train as it sped over the tracks lulled me to sleep.

We clink our wine cups.

‘Here’s to the old man.

‘The old man.’

Our view of our ground is suddenly blocked by a blue topped attendant. She stands in front of us and halts our nostalgic trip down the family memory lane. She looks like she’s just started her first year of university, and in a firm and clear voice, she asks for our tickets and stares at them ominously longer than she should when I show them to her. Then she tells us with stony faced solemness that the tickets we’ve bought only allows us to sit on the grass behind the seats, and we’ll have to move.

‘But we’ve always sat here.’

‘Where does it say that we can’t sit here?’

Our arguments are weak, our will and resolve weaker, and we gather up our belongings and move. We end walking through the wire gate again and on the concourse at the edge of the grandstand, leaning on the waist high wire fence in front of the members area. I grab my phone and check the Ticketek website. The attendant was right. In a recent decision for the new season that I missed, general admission to Leichhardt doesn’t entitle you to sit in the wooden seats in both pockets of the ground anymore. It only entitles you to the grass areas and the hill. You can stand if you like, but you can’t sit.

I watch as the attendant nabs other unsuspecting spectators. Some reluctantly move, and some, judging by their stiff and dissenting body language, argue stronger than us and stay rooted to their spots. The attendant gives up with the more assertive ones and moves on to other unsuspecting fans.

‘This is such a rugby league thing to do,’ I complain to Melinda. ‘They could have fenced off the area if they wanted to charge extra. What a rip-off.’ Melinda sees my angry side glances and pouted lips and disappears from my side. A couple of minutes later, another wine is pushed into my hand.

‘Let this one go, Gavin.’

‘Okay.’

A man and wife are sitting front of us. In their sixties, well dressed, in Titans gear, down from Queensland for the weekend. A strange thing unfolds. With each new arrival that sits near the man, whether they shuffle past him or sit in front of him, he pulls out a Titan scarf and wipes the chair clean for them before they sit down. He stretches across his wife, or lurches to the row of seats in front of him. He smiles, grins, makes jokes as he wipes the seats clean. His wife shows him the score from the Dolphins- Roosters match on her phone, she sees us glancing from behind and we make small talk. In the first match of their existence, in their first season in the NRL, the Dolphins are holding off the Roosters. When they turn back to watch the last few minutes of the Jersey Flegg match, Melinda whips out her phone.

‘I thought I recognised him,’ she whispers to me. Melinda shows me her phone. ‘Here, have a look at this.’

It’s a picture and a recent article from a national newspaper’s website of the man in front of us. The man sitting in front of us is the owner of the Titans.

‘It’s the fucken owner of the Titans,’ Melinda tells me in an excited hushed tone. ‘And he’s wiping chairs with one of his scarves. How good is rugby league, brother?’

I stare at the picture on her phone. It’s definitely him.

‘What the hell?’

A few minutes later, his corporate buddies from the Gold Coast catch up with them. Even the well off and wealthy aren’t immune from the flight chaos of Australia’s post Covid domestic travel. The owner and his wife of the Titans are whisked away by their friends up to the corporate seats in the grandstand behind us. The hooter sounds and the Jersey Flegg game ends. The Titans and Tigers players walk from the tunnels onto the oval for their warmups. The ground announcer revs up the crowd and the cheerleaders dance in the middle of the oval. The hill quickly fills, there is a constant stream of entrants walking along the oval, the seats in front of us are rapidly filling up, and with the help of the over loud and over enthusiastic ground announcer, the hum and excitement of the imminent start of the game is getting louder. The players finish their warm-ups and retreat back to their dressing rooms. The superhero coaching duo of Tim Sheens and Benji Marshall are going to usher in a new era and big and exciting things are expected. They’re going to squeeze the best from their existing players, unleash extra skills and talents from their high-prized recruits, and the club will be propelled into finals contention, or might even be premiership contenders. They only won one of their last twelve games in 2022 and sat lonely and adrift at the bottom of the ladder.

There is a flurry of activity in the race under the grandstand, and the Tiger players run out on the ground, the cheers from the crowd reach a matchday crescendo, and a minute later, the Titans players follow them. The colours, the green of the grass, the blue of the sky, the different colours of the teams, the packed ground – it always gets me. The lights that tower over the ground are just beginning to glow in the evening sky. Watching a game at Leichhardt is like dying and going to rugby league heaven. I’m not fussed who wins, I just love being here. But today I’m with my sister, and with my bucket hat on my head, I’m an honorary Tiger supporter. When the two teams take their positions on the field, I lean across to my sister and have to almost yell to her because of the noise around us. ‘They’ll smash the Titans,’ I tell her.  She knowingly nods her head in agreement. The ref raises his arm and blows his whistle, the ball is kicked down the ground, the game commences.

I was wrong. If anything, the Tigers are worse than last year, and it’s the Titans, a middle of the ladder proposition at the best of times who do all the smashing.

The West Tigers players fumble and drop balls, fluff passes, mess up their set plays and after that they take a two-point lead after an early penalty goal, they hand the game to the Titans on a plate. The Titans score two tries in each half and enjoy a comfortable win. The sidestepping skills of AJ Brimson, who scores the first runaway try for his team, and the size and strength of the Titans forwards pack prove too much for the Tigers, and the only part of the game Tiger fans would have enjoyed was the half-time entertainment. Primary school kids formed in lines under the goalposts at each end of the oval, and with a ball under their arm, sprinted the length of the ground as they raced each other, then they passed the ball to their teammates who ran back the other way as the race continued, which brought happy roars from around the ground.

Any hopes of a second half comeback were snuffed out in the first minute of play when the Tiger defence let the ball bounce on the try line after a looping kick from the last tackle, and Titan prop Sam McIntyre grabbed the loose ball and scored the easiest of tries.

When the game has ended and we’re walking the streets to the light rail station and are held up at intersections as police direct traffic, I peer over the shoulders of Tigers supporters I’m surrounded by as they message family and friends from their phones.

‘Same old Tigers.’

‘Their defence was hopeless.’

‘They’re fucken useless.’

Melinda and I walk down the stairs of the light rail station, we hug and say goodbye at my side of the station, then she walks across the tracks to her Central bound line. A minute later my tram comes, I line up with glum and dejected Tiger supporters who silently take their seats on the tram as they contemplate another long year of footy. The doors of the tram closes, and with a sharp yank, the tram pulls away from the station.

I sit, facing the window, looking out to the other stop. I see my sister, waiting in line for when her tram comes. I wave to her, my arms rocking back and forth like a madman, trying to get her attention, and right to the last second, I think she doesn’t see me. Then, there’s a flash of recognition from her, she sees me and waves back. My tram rides down a hill and she and the station disappears. I turn and sit upright in my seat. I take my hat off and put it in my bag.

My phone chimes. My sister.

‘What an awesome day.’

‘It was. Same again next year?’

The tram picks up pace. I see the night lights of the roads, cars and houses as the tram picks up speed. My muscles ache from standing for so long and I stretch my legs and back. A city bound tram rushes past us. It clangs it bell; the driver is saying hello to his co-worker. The driver of my tram rings his bell in return, the other tram clatters past us and is gone in seconds.

My sister messages again.

‘Absolutely.’

 

 

 

Read more from Paul Harman (aussiewombles) HERE

 

 

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