51

It was as Golder promised. The young Queenslander became briefly famous by dazzling his way past two disoriented defenses in the first games of the new season. “You watch,” Eric Samuels told Delaney. “The opposition’s going to wake up to him. Sure, he’s got a few nice tricks. But he’s brittle and his sidestep’s too easy to read. You watch, you watch. The first good lock he plays against is going to kill him.”

To Delaney the success of Golder’s Queenslander was only a token annoyance and stood for the deeper derangement of the world. He had therefore played two tough and vengeful games in reserves, and through this accident found himself much praised in the clubhouse, as if his new ferocity was a deliberate tactical choice he had made based only on considerations to do with the game.

In the third encounter of the season, the Queenslander met the good lock Eric Samuels had predicted and was choked off all day and left the field limping. According to Golder’s promise, he would now have only half a game left to recover form. Delaney however did not quite believe Golder’s promise, or anyone’s.

In the fourth game, before a rabid crowd at Saint George, a tendon snapped in the Queenslander’s calf. Delaney came on five minutes after halftime and helped halt a tide of Saint George tries. It was announced on the evening news that the Queenslander would be on crutches for six weeks. The following Tuesday night a Herald photographer came to training and took a photograph of Delaney running with the ball. It appeared with the announcement that Golder would be using him at five-eighth for some time, perhaps forever.

There was always a ferocity in the air at Redfern. They called this team the Rabbitohs, after the Depression days when the unemployed of South Sydney used to hunt rabbits in that low country of sand dunes and sell them door-to-door. Half the crowd seemed to have the toughness of Depression survivors, old men with the shadows of a hard life on their faces, old women who knew their football backwards and wore green and red beanies on their heads. And then, lots of dangerous kids, the kind you saw rioting on English football fields in the evening news. It was exactly the sort of fierce crowd Delaney welcomed that Sunday—an away game, and the world against you. And a new ferocity inside.

Once when he was young he had met a great Saint George forward and asked the man what he did on the morning of a test match against the poms—what time he woke, what he ate, what he told himself? The forward replied that he got up about nine, ate a steak half an hour later, and when he ran onto the Cricket Ground he repeated the proposition, “I’m the toughest bastard here.”

The young Delaney had been a little shocked. Five-eighths got by on craft, by niftiness. A five-eighth could not credibly promise himself that he was the toughest bastard there. The young Delaney himself was not in it for the aggression, had been sure he never would be. These days though he understood the veteran. As he ran onto Redfern Oval, down the wire-caged walk placed to prevent the crones of South Sydney from attacking players or referees, his jaw was retracted, his teeth slightly apart, his mouthguard tight in his fist.

Gorrie, the Gilgandra boy, was playing second row that day, in tandem with Tancred. The selectors still stuck with Tancred. On a heavier winter day like today, he had time to pull his Yorkshire tricks.

And he was certainly good weight in the scrums. Penrith won the first two but were cramped—the Rabbitoh back line standing at least a meter offside, forcing Delaney to run too wide, and the referee too intimidated by the partisans in the grandstand to chastise the local team. Delaney found himself cut down brutally from the flank by the South Sydney center, the young one named Lynch, another whiz kid. Lynch had all the tricks, all the savageries. Before getting up, he gouged and scored Delaney’s eyeball with his blindside thumb. A home crowd would have seen it and protested. This crowd cheered.

Delaney had not regained clear vision when Lynch took the ball in midfield and ran forty meters with it, leaving the forwards standing. Except for Gorrie, who, being young and from the country, did not know when he was up against a champion, and so ran the man down ten meters out from the goal line.

Now came a passage of frantic defense, the ecstasy of the crowd breaking like a surf behind the goal line. Delaney himself was in an ecstasy, tackling low, letting the ones who didn’t know how to go in higher on the bodies of the Rabbitohs. Lynch wore all the time a cat’s smile on his face, and if possible, when tackled, always levered himself upright with a hand placed across Delaney’s face. When the Rabbitoh try came, it was the result of a movement between Lynch and their young second-rower, their fast Queensland winger. Even Gorrie was left shamed and standing. Tancred blinked, flat-footed and bemused, like a parent whose children were beyond him. By halftime it was 12 to nothing, the crowd were singing a taunting chant: “Look at the scoreboard!” Delaney knew the commentators would be saying that the Penrith lads were lucky it wasn’t 24 to nothing. Golder’s halftime exhortation was full of obscenities, and Delaney found himself, for the first time since his childhood, very nearly denouncing another player to his coach, very nearly accusing Tancred of stupidity, cowardice, malice.

Delaney ran back on head-hunting for Lynch. As Golder had said, the bastard was opening up the defense as if it was a can of bloody dog food.

The Rabbitohs, it seemed to Delaney, were winning all the scrums now. Running on a diagonal, gathering an intimidating speed, Lynch was coming through, yelling to his five-eighth for the ball. Delaney felt a lightness, a certainty. Sometimes, when you’re out of oxygen and elated and fierce, you got those certainties, the pattern became apparent. He was sure he could stop Lynch and no one else could. It was one of those rare times when you did not worry about position, and you ran any distance to achieve the ordained result. He had Lynch’s measure. He knew which way he would turn with the ball before the ball was even in his hands. For a time he was certain he would go in low, but three or at most four paces from Lynch he realized it must be high, in case Lynch had a colleague further out moving at that same pace, and got the ball to him. Exultantly, Delaney straightened, brought his arm up to collect Lynch’s shoulder. He felt nothing but raw delight when the arm took Lynch’s face and something parted there and Lynch’s clever eyes glazed.

Lynch lay flat and unmoving on the paddock. Delaney heard with a strange surprise the ranting of the crowd, saw the referee waving someone off the field. In a few gasps, with a little more oxygen to the brain, he understood it was him. He looked at the referee’s hands, fixing on the fingers, which would tell him whether he was gone for five or ten minutes. But the referee did not use his fingers, used merely a backhanded gesture of total banishment. Leaving the field, Delaney would not have survived the hatred of the harsh natives of South Sydney had it not been for the wire cage.