IN A TIME BEFORE replacements were allowed in Rugby League, toughing it out was often the measure of a man. Leaving the field, even to nurse a broken bone, was hard to do if the match was tight and your mates needed you. Heroes were made in such circumstances. Clive Churchill once played on with a broken arm to set up a South Sydney premiership win. Alan Prescott led England for most of a Test match with a broken arm hanging useless at his side to win the Ashes. Some played on with broken jaws and missing teeth, and a concussion that rendered a man senseless was not even considered a real injury. It was at once heroic and stupid, and it defined a time in which Rugby League, like boxing, had a bloodied edge to it. It was a hard game for hard men.
Wiser minds understood the folly of not allowing replacements. It was dangerous for the injured, obviously. But it also distorted contests when continuing was impossible and a team played short, or when crippled players continued on the field despite being beyond useful contribution. Introducing replacements was not easy. Any advantage a team could find in those days was taken, legal or illegal, and abusing a rule that allowed replacements was relatively easy. If Johnny was not going well or was a bit tired, it was not difficult to feign injury and get somebody fitter and fresher into the fray. Administrators tried a range of systems to allow genuine replacement and discourage rorters. They made a tentative start in the early ’60s by allowing a replacement for an injured player in the first half only, and then only with a player who had played an earlier game.They limited it to two. By 1970 they extended it to allow replacements through the full game. By 1984 they were allowing four replacements.
They might have been better off if they had left it at that. But by the middle ’80s when blood-borne disease had become a concern, they started the blood bin, and then the head bin to have concussed players checked out. By the 1987 grand final, when Manly were discovering allegedly semi-conscious players all over the park, the head bin became a revolving door. Tired players were off for a ten-minute rest, and fresh players enthusiastically grabbed their spot.Trying to contain the replacement rule to genuine purposes of safety and match integrity died that day. Since then it has pretty much been open slather.
The next year the league introduced two fresh reserves, and by the early ’90s it was four fresh reserves and unlimited interchange. They could change whoever they liked for whatever reason, as often as they wanted. That was overdone, too, so they limited it to twelve interchanges, and then ten. A lot of old players hate it. It keeps the game fast and intense, but it tightens defences in the late stages of games where they once opened up. It diminishes the value of endurance, and to men of the Provan–Summons era, it is hard to escape a sense of artificiality in the way it distorts a contest.
NORM PROVAN
One of the fundamentals of Rugby League as I saw it was to be in top physical condition. I worked hard on my condition so that I knew I could go as hard at the end of the game as at the beginning.When I started to feel that I couldn’t, I knew that was the time I had to retire.To me Rugby League was an 80-minute game, and despite all our talents I still believe St George were as good as they were through my era because they were fitter than anybody else. These days there is not the reward for that sort of fitness that there should be. Blokes lacking endurance just get replaced. They come off, have a rest, then go back looking refreshed, lift their pace, and everybody says how good they are. I don’t think so. If they were as good as they should be, they wouldn’t have had to come off in the first place.
You might have guessed I’m not a fan of the modern replacement rule. I know things change, and I know there is an argument for playing the whole game with people who can hack it. But it is just not real for me.The turnover is too high. It upsets the rhythm of the game and it denies the advantages that should be there for players with endurance. Much of what we did in my time was geared to bring its greatest profit in the late stages of a game. You would wear them down in the forwards, and when defences tired in the last quarter of the game, that’s when things would open up. It meant that the overall standard of a team was important. Forwards to lay the foundation, fitness to keep it all going, and flourish at the end when the talents of your quick men really came to the fore.
You hear a lot about Rugby League being a game of character. To me character is lots of things. It’s how hard you try. It’s how hard you commit yourself to your mates. It’s how well you can handle a bit of adversity. It’s how you cope with a little pain. And above all, it’s not giving up. The way the replacement rule was in our day sorted out the character in a team. It found men of great courage, who would bear setbacks that would horrify a modern player just so they didn’t let down their team-mates. When I first started following Saints, Johnny Hawke was their five-eighth and captain, and he played a marvellous game in the 1949 grand final to win the premiership. But I remember how distraught everybody was when he got hurt in the semi-final. He broke his upper jaw and damaged a lot of teeth against Souths, and they carted him off in terrible shape. But he came back on to the field that day to set up the winning try. I don’t know what they did to fix his teeth and his jaw, but he was back for the grand final three weeks later and was the dominant player.
There was a lot of courage involved, but somehow it didn’t seem out of the ordinary. Clive Churchill broke his arm early in a game against Manly in 1955, but played out the game and kicked a winning goal from the sideline. It was part of an amazing run of eleven wins to climb from nowhere and win the premiership. Then there was our own Bill Wilson, who broke his forearm against Balmain early in a game somewhere in the middle 1950s. He wouldn’t even think about leaving.You could see the bend in his arm, and he must have been in awful pain, but he just kept going and made a pretty good contribution to the game, too. Billy was doing that all the time. Once he went off to hospital for some serious repair to a face wound but got back in time for the late part of the game.They didn’t come any tougher than Bill Wilson.
I can remember Johnny Raper playing on with a cracked breastbone, and of course there was that heroic effort in Brisbane in 1958 when the English captain Alan Prescott broke his arm in the first few minutes and refused to leave. We tried everything we knew to sort him out, but he kept going and was there at the end when England won the game and claimed the Ashes. I can remember myself on a number of occasions staggering back to the field when I had had a knock to the head and had only a rough idea of where I was or what I was doing. People were getting knocked out all the time, coming to and carrying on. It wasn’t even considered a real injury in those days. So long as your legs worked you were OK. These days a lot more is understood about the dangers of concussion and a mandatory period out of football is commonplace, but in those days anything went.
Writing about it now, all these years on, I can see that much of what we did in football half a century ago was pretty foolhardy. But it had character. It had a quality that probably has been romanticised a little but was very real and very important to all of us who played the game then. It is hard to find a happy medium, but the replacement rule seems to have gone from one extreme to the other. It might have been a bit silly in our time to have to play on with broken bones. But these days the relentless intrusion of the interchange system is crazy. It turns the game into musical chairs.
ARTHUR SUMMONS
It was always my belief that one of the great virtues of a good Rugby League team was stamina. Being able to go the distance. Clearly the way the game is structured today is largely a result of the introduction of the interchange rule. Teams are built to maximise the rule’s potential. Good defenders go on when the game needs tightening, game-breakers go on when they need to pull something out of the box in attack. As a result the pace and the shape of the game are determined by how well replacements are made. It is a feature of Rugby League that is here to stay, and it is just one of many things that make the game today a very different game from the one that we used to play. But to those of us who did play under the no-replacement rule, the thing that sticks in our craw most about the replacement system today is that it rewards the wrong people. It rewards the fatigued . . . those who lack stamina. Giving them a rest so they can revive themselves for later heroics goes against the grain as far as I am concerned.
For entertainment value, you can see why they do it the way they do. Fresh people lift the competitive tension. They keep the game faster than it would otherwise be. And they offer some variety, especially late in games if things are tight. But there is an argument, too, that games used to break open at the end, when people were tired. That’s when all the fun started. Building a game meant the good sides who were fit and had stamina did all the heavy work early, then reaped the reward in the late stages of their matches. I don’t particularly like the interchange system. But I didn’t like the other extreme that meant you played short if someone was hurt, or a crippled player just kept going when it was obviously dangerous to do so. There is a fine line between being a hero and being stupid. My attitude would be to allow replacements, but to make them permanent. A player who comes off the field should stay off the field. Make a replacement by all means, but not over and over, with players doing the on-again-off-again thing. That’s a frustration, and at its core I don’t think it is in the spirit of the game.