NRL 2026 – The Prospector’s Pickaxe: 1976 to 2026 – ‘it’s a long way to the top’.

 

 

The NRL season is underway with the now traditional Las Vegas extravaganza. Over the next few weeks, there will be games played in Auckland, Townsville, Melbourne, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Canberra and, of course, Sydney. The game has come an exceptionally long way and PVL is talking of a worldwide round in the near future and, as well, the expansion teams, the Perth Bears and the PNG Chiefs, will enter over the next two seasons. It goes without saying, the game was very different 50 years ago.

In 1976, Malcom Fraser was PM after the infamous ‘Dismissal’ of the Whitlam government and AC/DC had just released ‘It’s a long way to the top (if you wanna rock and roll)’, but ABBA were top of the pops and ‘Fernando’ was the biggest selling single of the year. Easts were the reigning premiers, having won in 1974 and 1975 under Jack Gibson and captained by Arthur Beetson.

However Manly would win the premiership in 1976, their third of four premierships for the decade. They held out an emerging Parramatta team and survived a ‘flying wedge’ as the Eels desperately attacked their line in the latter stages. They would also benefit from the Neville Glover drop which would have tied the scores.

The NSWRL was a 12-team competition in 1976. The most northerly club was Manly, and the southernmost club was Cronulla Sutherland, a distance of 43 kms. The most easterly club was Eastern Suburbs and the western-most club was Penrith. The distance between these two clubs is 61kms. In total, the whole competition covered an area of 2623 square kms. When you consider that there are seventy-five cattle stations in Australia with an area in excess of 4000 square kms, it was very much a Sydney suburban competition. Ray Higgs from Parramatta won the prestigious Rothmans Medal, the first of four consecutive wins for the Eels.

It featured 4 teams that are no longer a part of the NRL, at least in their own right, Newtown, Norths, Wests and Balmain. The Round 1 fixtures saw matches played at Endeavour Field, Cumberland Oval, Redfern Oval, Leichhardt Oval, Lidcombe Oval and Penrith Park.  The other venues used as home grounds were Brookvale Oval, Henson Park, Kogarah, Belmore, North Sydney Oval and the Sydney Sports Ground. All finals matches were played at the SCG.

In Brisbane, there were 8 teams, the four compass points, Norths, Souths, Easts and Wests, then Brothers, Valleys and the protagonists for the fictitious Moreton Bay Cup, Redcliffe and Wynnum Manly. Wests, the glamour team of the competition in this era, would win again in 1976 after defeating my team, Redcliffe, 26 to 24 in a thriller in the 1975 Grand Final.  They defeated Easts by the strange scoreline of 16 to 1 to go back-to-back.

The match of the round was played at Lang Park, broadcast on the radio live, and replayed on TV at 6.30pm. As I was only 13 years old at the time, I generally listened to the match of the day on the radio 4IP with Billy J Smith and Ross Lawson. It featured crosses to all other matches being played as they all kicked off at 3.00pm on Sunday. The suburban grounds were Bishop Park (Norths), Davies Park (Souths), Langlands Park (Easts), Purtell Park (Wests), Corbett Park (Brothers), Neumann Oval (Valleys), the Redcliffe showgrounds, and Kougari Oval (Wynnum).

Wests often had the match of the day, and Lang Park was almost a home ground for them. They drew crowds in excess of 20,000 and the Frank Burke Stand would erupt into chants of “Wests, Wests, Wests”. Their stars included Greg ‘Slippery’ McCarthy, Wayne Stewart, Harry Cameron, Geoff Richardson, Greg Oliphant and a young John Ribot. Ron Raper was the coach. The Rothmans Medal that year was won by ‘the big Marn’, Darryl Brohman, then playing for Norths.

Sydney football was something of a mystery for us Queenslanders, although the introduction of the AMCO cup in 1974 was a real highlight for fans starved of coverage. Famously, Western Division won the first instalment of the Cup. By 1976, the Amco Cup had grown to a staggering thirty-five teams, although it would get even larger over the next couple of years. All 12 Sydney clubs, all Brisbane clubs except Wynnum Manly, Ryde Eastwood, Auckland, and Canterbury from NZ, all 8 NSW country divisions, the NT and teams from NQ, Toowoomba, Wide Bay and Ipswich took part. Balmain prevailed over North Sydney in the final over the four-quarter format under lights at Leichhardt Oval. In era where you had ‘Pot Black’ and ‘The Big Match’ as the only sport offerings on TV apart from the footy replays, it was manna from heaven and compulsory viewing on a Wednesday night. We saw more of Eddie Charlton and Ray Reardon than we did of ‘Bozo’ Fulton and Arthur Beetson on our screens in 1976.

The main source of information on the Sydney League was the Rugby League Week, eagerly collected from the newsagent on a Wednesday and devoured from cover to cover before day’s end. Despite the relative dearth of information, Rugby League was the main talking point everywhere you went.

The game has certainly come a long way since the seventies, but for many of us we continue to talk about these times. Seeing Paul Hogan driven around Lang Park on the back of a truck, throwing cigarettes to the crowd at the 1977 Grand Final is not something we are likely to see again. Talk to you all next week.

 

Image: Wikikmedia Commons

 

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