THE ASTUTE MELBOURNE CAPTAIN Cameron Smith has a long list of achievements to set him above the pack as a Rugby League footballer. His man-of-the-match awards at every level of the game are legion. He captains the Queensland State of Origin team and the Australian Test team and he has been honoured internationally as the best hooker in the game. His highest recommendation, however, comes closer to home. Ask any of his Melbourne contemporaries who is the greatest player in the game and they have plenty to pick from. But despite the quality of men like Greg Inglis and Billy Slater, the judgement of his peers tips the scales heavily in favour of Smith.
There are many reasons for this: his cool command on the field; his prolific goal-kicking; his vision and his ability to make decisions quickly. But above all Smith is very much a creature of his time. He plays like a halfback. All hookers do. He is supreme among his peers as the maestro of the orchestra, the choreographer of the movement that provides scope and opportunity for the rare talents around him. The one thing an artist like Smith does not have to worry about is a labourer’s work at the scrum. Winning the ball is no longer required of the man in the middle of the front row. It happens automatically, ritually, easily and without any real involvement from hookers.
There is no position in the modern Rugby League team that so starkly defines the difference between the way the game is played today and the way it was played when Norm Provan and Arthur Summons were at their peak, and old warhorses like Ken ‘Killer’ Kearney and Noel Kelly were at the forefront of every battle. The role of the hooker has morphed from a dog-eat-dog battle in which winning the ball was the prime concern, if not the only concern, into a more nuanced role, where control at the scrum is no longer important. Rather, the hooker is charged with controlling just about everything else.
It has been a gathering change since the 1960s, when referees decided to clamp down on cheating hookers to the extent that they were being ordered from the field, week after week, for the all-encompassing sin of ‘repeated scrum infringements’. It became farcical, but no matter how stern the referees and how frustrated the administration, nothing seemed to make a difference. The scrum was an eternal shambles. So everybody just gave up. Whoever fed the ball to the scrum was allowed to do virtually whatever they liked with it. Feeding the second row, once a mortal sin, became an accepted tactic at every scrum. Without the need for a hard competitor in the middle of the front row, teams started to look for other skills—for inventive dummy halves; for secondary halfbacks who had all the visionary skills necessary to manage runners, to make a bit of a dart themselves, to kick judiciously when required and to take a commanding role of the game’s tactics and strategies.
If you wanted to pick a moment when the transformation of the hooker’s role became complete, the 1995 World Cup in England is as good a place as any. Bob Fulton was the Australian coach. He had in his team two specialist hookers in Wayne Bartrim and Aaron Raper, but he used neither of them in the big games. Andrew Johns, halfback with the Newcastle Knights, had emerged for the tournament as a rookie of unbridled promise. Also in the team was Geoff Toovey, the Manly scrum half who was as tough as teak and an experienced operator who provided an imaginative link between forwards and backs.
Fulton developed a scheme whereby Johns would pack at hooker in the scrums, with Toovey at halfback, but in general play Toovey would revert to dummy half and Johns would work as first receiver. It added to the play-making potential of the side, and it provided enormous flexibility. It also worked a treat. Australia won that World Cup against huge odds—it was played in the first angry year of the Super League war and most of Australia’s top players were ruled ineligible, having signed for the rebel organisation.
Fulton’s brainwave also formalised the way the hooker role would be seen from that point on. It was no longer a ball-winning role. It gave a team an extra attacking option and widened the skill base in that a virtual extra back was in play. It would have seemed a strange turn of events to the hookers of Provan and Summons’ day, for whom the battle for the ball at the scrum was a wild and violent affair crucial to a team’s success. In those days of unlimited tackles, a scrum ball won was a special jewel, because a well-drilled side could hang on to the ball interminably. It bred hookers of gladiatorial determination.
One such competitor was Ken ‘Killer’ Kearney, who joined St George in 1952 and is credited with being the brains behind their ultimate rise to eleven straight premierships. He was captain for the first of them, and captain–coach for the next five, although injury restricted him to non-playing coach for much of the fifth. He was also Australia’s Test hooker, captaining the side in nine of his 21 internationals and leading the 1956 Kangaroos to England as captain–coach. Kearney had been a Wallaby, playing seven Tests including all five on the Wallaby tour of Britain and France in 1947–48. After the tour he signed with Leeds in England, where he learned a thing or two about scrummaging, as well as gathering a tactical awareness that was to lift St George way above the pack.
As an indicator of just how the hooker’s role has changed, Kearney’s outpouring to author Larry Writer for his 1995 book on the St George premiership run, Never Before, Never Again, paints a pretty good picture:
Things went on in those north of England scrums I’d never dreamed of. Loose arms, the opposing half would throw the ball either into the second row or right at my face, I was punched from the second row, head-butted, bitten, scratched, had mud rubbed in my eyes. I didn’t stand a chance. Then one day in that first year after a game in which I’d been thrashed for the ball by the great Wigan and Great Britain hooker Joe Egan, he gave me some advice: ‘Remember this, laad. In Rugby League the hooker’s job stops and starts with winning the ball, no matter how you do it.’ Then and there I decided that I would fight back and become a ruthless ball-winner. From that day my catchcry was ‘retaliate first’. Be aggressive. Thump them before they thump you . . .
NORM PROVAN
Nobody will ever convince me that the game today is as hard as it was then. Killer Kearney competed hard at the scrum, but he was by no means on his own. There was no quarter given anywhere in those days. And it wasn’t just the scrum. There was a general acceptance that it was a hard game, and that seemed to excuse a lot of violent stuff that went on. A lot of players thought they would be considered a bit of a sook if they weren’t in there clobbering somebody.
Referees allowed a lot of leeway, and it was considered part of every game that some sorting out would go on. One of the big differences was that it was all done in the moment . . . we didn’t have incessant replays to analyse it all and none of the close camera stuff that makes that sort of behaviour impossible today. It was on, then it was over, and we all just got on with it.
All of us who played in those years admire how athletic the players of today are and how strong they are. There is no question that they spend a lot more time building themselves up than we ever did, and most of it seems to be about building bulk. The collisions are hard and the game is still hard. But it is not as hard as it was then. It has been cleaned up a lot. Nobody gets blindsided the way we did. But amid all the hard stuff we still had a lot of football in us, and Killer Kearney is a good example of that. He brought an enormous range of skills with him when he joined St George, skills he had learned in English club football, and so much of his game was very, very clever. It was the base on which St George built their winning years.
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In attitudes to the scrum, the 1960s Wests hooker Noel ‘Ned’ Kelly was of like mind to Kearney. When it came to the rest of his game, he personified the sort of macho mayhem that Kearney saw as a base element of Rugby League in his time. Kelly was an exemplar of his era, a hard and uncompromising forward who would not take a backward step. He played nine seasons with Wests, made three Kangaroo tours, and was a fine player with 25 Tests to his credit. Yet he is perhaps remembered less for his many achievements than he is for the way he played. Kelly copped plenty and he gave plenty, and he won such renown among the referees of the time he was sent from the field on seventeen occasions. He reckoned the referees had him lined up, and that the reputation was sent off more often than the man. But his reputation was well won. Arthur Summons fed a lot of scrums in which Kelly was his hooker, and he too marvels at the change that has overtaken the hooking role.
ARTHUR SUMMONS
I think it is hard for a modern player to imagine just what it was like in those days. I remember one of my early games at Wests when an opposition prop was giving us some trouble and the boys decided to sort him out. It was all very clinical. Our big second-rower Kel O’Shea simply asked prop John ‘Chow’ Hayes to move aside a touch so he could get a clean shot, and he let a punch go from the second row that claimed a few of our troublesome rival’s teeth. I was new to the team at this stage, and the extraordinary thing to me was that it was not considered anything out of the ordinary. It was just something that was done. They were ruthless. The scrum certainly was no place for the faint-hearted.
I had come from Rugby, where the football was certainly tough but scrums were a different thing altogether. Front rowers and second rowers were too involved in pushing or trying to hold their ground. Letting a grip go to punch somebody would have crippled their scrum. I had played five-eighth mostly, and it wasn’t until I got into first grade in 1961 at Wests that I became a regular halfback. I thought feeding the scrum was just putting the ball in between the two front rows. Noel Kelly quickly enlightened me.
Kelly had only just come down from Queensland as an international and he didn’t like people getting the better of him. We played Souths early on, and their hooker Fred Anderson was putting it all over Noel. Kelly grabbed hold of me and said, ‘Look, put it under my feet’ in a way that seemed to carry a lot of threat with it. He was on my team but he was pretty intimidating. But it didn’t matter where I put it, Anderson kept winning the ball. Kelly rounded on me something fierce. ‘You’re the worst #@&*% halfback I’ve ever played with,’ he roared. I learned quickly after that. Everybody cheated in scrums, and the team that cheated best won.
Kelly was typical of many of the hard men who were part of every team in those days. If someone was getting the better of him, he would do whatever he felt he had to do to discourage them. Some of it was not pretty. He was a tough and at times cruel player on the field, but he was a fabulous bloke and a great man to have in your team. Off the field, like so many of the strong-arm blokes of that time, he was a model citizen, a great family man, considerate, funny and a total gentleman.
The skills of the modern hooker are very different. I look at some of them and wonder where I would have ended up playing in this sort of environment. Maybe I would have been a hooker as well. The skills they need now are the same skills I tried to develop as a halfback, and you can’t help but admire them. Most of the good teams have them—Cameron Smith, Michael Ennis, Matt Balin and the rest. But the transformation has come about not to add to the appeal of the scrum, but to destroy it. It is a common complaint of the players of my generation that the absence of a genuine contest at the scrum has taken away one of the central planks of the game as we knew it. The game has grown very predictable, very patterned. So much reliance is placed on a clever kick to a leaping winger. There is so much mindless repetition in the tackles that lead up to that kick.
I don’t suggest that the game today is lacking skill. There is plenty of that among a lot of very talented athletes. But the demise of the scrum has taken away an area of competition that, in the game’s original design, was fundamental to it. The play-the-ball was established as a legitimate contest as well, with two men opposed to each other in a genuine rucking duel, with the ball supposedly dropped between them and both attacker and defender able to strike for it. It was supposed to be an equal contest. Maybe the sort of world in which Kelly and Kearney did their thing made the scrum impossible to manage, although I don’t know that a lot of imagination was shown in trying to save it. Kelly reckons the modern scrum is a ‘lean-to’. He wrote in his book that they were ‘a pale and limp-wristed masquerade of what they were supposed to be’.
For those of us who played through another time, I think we all agree.
Ken ‘Killer’ Kearney was at the end of his career when I started with Wests, but it was no secret to any of us that he was a very good hooker and an even better captain–coach. Whatever Kearney might have done as a ball-winner, though, was probably secondary to what he had done for Saints as a tactician, as a pioneering coach, and ultimately as the man at the heart of what the club had become through that long premiership run.
NORM PROVAN
One of the worst features of the modern scrum, where there is no longer any contest, is that it leads to smothering defences. If you know with absolute certainty which team is going to get the ball, defenders know exactly where they stand. It gives defenders a big advantage over attackers. It is the same at the play-the-ball. It was always the case that the man playing the ball had a big advantage, but back in the days when a defender could strike for it there was always a chance. That chance tended to keep defenders back a bit in case they needed to attack rather than just line up ready to smash somebody.
The old scrums might have been a bit of a donnybrook, but they had a character to them as well. As much as anything, they typified the sort of battle that a game of Rugby League was supposed to be, when tough men stood up to each other and fought hard for the ball. Rugby League today has plenty of big hits and nobody says it is not tough. But in sacrificing the scrum they have lost that extra edge, where a group of players came up against a group of players, and everybody had to contribute. It was teamwork in every sense of the word.