Anthony Mundine names David Peachey as the best on-field sledger he played against

He’s one of the best trash-talkers rugby league has ever seen, and now Anthony Mundine has named the unassuming David Peachey as a surprise candidate for the best sledgers he’s ever played against. WATCH THE VIDEO

He’s one of the best trash-talkers rugby league has ever seen, and now Anthony Mundine has named the unassuming David Peachey as a surprise candidate for the best sledgers he’s ever played against.

A brilliant ball-running fullback for the Sharks, Peachey is an unlikely trash-talker, but Mundine says he always gave as good as he got.

“We always used to talk mad shit to each other,” Mundine told this masthead. “I was always the brash, cocky, confident one, but Dave was more quietly confident.

“He knew what he could do and how good he was, but he didn’t always bring it out like I did.

“He could talk shit though.”

Anthony Mundine says David Peachey was the biggest trash-talker on the field.

Mundine says their sporting rivalry goes back to basketball tournaments around Wellington and Dubbo when they were younger.

“We always had cracking games and us boys from Redfern would always beat them, and I’d be trash talking,” he said. “Dave was a year or two older than me, so when we started playing footy and making top grade and having battles.

“We used to shit talk at each other all the time, and it was a bit more personal with us because of that family history.”

The most famous example was in the 1999 Preliminary final between Mundine’s Dragons and Peachey’s Sharks.

Peachey had an early try disallowed, before making one of his trademark scything runs, splitting the Dragons defence to score under the posts.

“I think we’d dropped the ball from a scrum and he ran past me, tapped me on the bum and said, ‘Try time, baby!’” Mundine said. “I was like, ‘Alright, Dave, we’ll see’ and he ended up scoring!

“I said, ‘I can’t let this cat get the better of me, I’ll have to start carving up’.”

In what became something of a personal vendetta, Mundine scored a hat-trick en route to a 24-8 win.

Anthony Mundine and Allan Langer.

His first came when he steamrolled over Peachey and two other Cronulla defenders.

“I hit a gap, got over, scored and just told him, ‘That’s number one, brother, that’s number one!’” he said. “He was still underneath me and I was just talking at him.

“I scored again and told him, ‘That’s number two!’ and got over a third time and told him, ‘That’s number three!’

“We used to talk mad shit to each other, and I knew I was getting under his skin.”

That was an example of Mundine’s trash talk working well, but ‘The Man’ has plenty of examples of it going the other way too.

In early 2000, Mundine said Melbourne had “got lucky” in their 20-18 Grand Final win the year before.

St George promptly copped a 70-10 hammering by the defending premiers in Melbourne that same weekend, but that wasn’t the end of it for Mundine, who was put on a media ban by coach David Waite.

“We got belted 70-10 and we got back to the airport in Sydney and were waiting for our bags,” he said. “When my bag came out, they’d taken all the little baggage tag stickers that you scan – the ones with the barcodes that you can peel off – they’d got heaps of them, wrote out ’70-10’ on my bag.

“It must have been the baggage handlers. But that’s the backlash you get if you don’t get it right.”

Andrew and Matty Johns were both big on-field talkers.

THE BEST SLEDGERS ANTHONY MUNDINE FACED

David Peachey: “We always used to trash talk each other, but he’d give to everyone.”

Alfie Langer: “Not a lot of guys would talk back in the day, but Alfie would. He talked mad shit. The best players could do it, because they could back it up, and Alfie was winning everything.”

Gorden Tallis: “No one would mess with Tallis. He was like a tornado.”

Andrew and Matthew Johns: “They were both talkers. Matt used to do this 1, 2, 3 step – right, left, right or left, right, left depending if he was on the left or right. One time I did his own step on him down at Kogarah – 1, 2, 3 – and we scored. I turned back to him and said, ‘I used your own step on ya, brah, what happened there?’. He couldn’t say anything when you score.”

Originally published as Anthony Mundine names David Peachey as the best on-field sledger he played against