Campo’s Classics: For the 2004 Rabbitohs even a draw was a miracle
No team in modern times has endured a run as wretched as South Sydney endured in the years after their readmission, but once in a while they would pull off a miracle.
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The footy is gone, we don’t know when it’ll come back and that absolutely sucks (but it might be close).
But until it comes back, we can always think back to great games from the past.
Every week until the NRL comes back, we’ll dive into a classic game from the archives and dissect how it was won and lost, and what it meant.
Campo’s Corner might be on ice for a while — welcome to Campo’s Classics.
This week we travel back to 2004, when South Sydney were in the midst of their lowest ebb, and relive an incredible draw they had with the Broncos.
If ever your team is struggling - and I mean really struggling, as in the coach is about to get sacked, the star player is leaving, the other star player is fighting injury, the youngsters aren’t kicking on and the finals are nothing but a distant, impossible dream and you want to fall to your knees and scream to the heavens that you hate caring about this goddamn team so much - I want you to take a few deep breaths and know that as bad as it may be, it can always get worse.
Your team, for example, could have been the South Sydney Rabbitohs from 2002 to 2006.
There are no current day parallels for what life was like for the Rabbitohs in those early years following their resurrection. The Knights came close from 2015 to 2017, especially with their one-win season in 2016, but they didn’t quite get there. Newcastle might have been cast into darkness, South Sydney climbed down and stayed there for a very long time.
The highlight of their difficult years following their readmission was the 2005 season when they managed nine whole wins - count ‘em, nine - good enough for 13th on the ladder. South Sydney always have their history to fall back on (it was what saved them from extinction when the NRL told them to hit the bricks) but in 2004 it was just that - history.
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All the things that made Souths special - George Treweek, and Jack Raynor, and John Sattler, and Harold Horder, and Bob McCarthy, and Ron Coote, and Clive Churchill and the 20 premierships and the Pride of the League - were names in faded books or figures that flickered on black and white film.
Until Russell Crowe and Peter Holmes a Court came in and changed the Rabbitohs forever, they were in the midst of the longest finals drought in the club’s history. After winning the 1989 minor premiership (when they were bounded out of the finals in straight sets) they captured the wooden spoon the following year and settled in at the foot of the ladder.
From 1990 to 1999 they never won more than 10 games in a season and they won less than five games in a season five times. From 1996 to 1998 they did not attract a home crowd of more than 10,000 people. Things got so bad the NRL no longer wanted they who were once the Pride of the League.
Souths fought when others merged, and they won their survival in a stirring display of the best of rugby league, but upon resurrection nothing seemed to change. They missed two seasons, but didn’t skip a beat.
In 2002, they were saved from the wooden spoon by the salary cap Bulldogs. In 2003 they did the thing properly, winning three games and claiming last place by a mile. They did it again in 2004, climbed all the way up to 13th place in 2005 before righting the ship and crashing to another wooden spoon in 2006.
In these five seasons the Rabbitohs used 101 players in first grade. It was a constant churn of up and comers that went nowhere, journeymen getting paid like stars, lucrative risks that never paid off and, occasionally, players who managed to shine despite the chaos around them.
If you have ever been in the unfortunate position of supporting a team that is, without question, utterly hopeless, you will know that small victories become large ones very quickly. If a team wins three games in a season, those wins are more valuable than the 17 wins a minor premiership team may win.
An 18-16 victory over the 2003 Tigers holds little value to most, but when it’s all you have it’s a treasure beyond price because there’s nothing in rugby league half as good as winning, and any win, no matter the form, gives a little bit of hope that the desolation won’t last forever.
The Rabbitohs’ fade from prominence and dance with death itself coincided with the ascension of the Brisbane Broncos. As Souths fell from prominence in the 1990s, the Queenslanders shot to the top and stayed there, winning premierships, forming the beating heart of Super League and becoming one of the competition’s blue bloods because they believed they belonged at the top and had the stars, success and cash to back it up.
In 2004, the Rabbitohs were headed for another wooden spoon. They were anchored to the bottom of the ladder, having won five games all season, and were in the midst of a six-match losing streak in which they had held their opposition to less than 30 points once, when they hosted Brisbane in Round 25.
Brisbane were third on the ladder, they’d spent the year ensconced in the top four and had the finals to worry about in two weeks time, and they would brush the Rabbitohs aside as they had every time the two teams had met since 1989.
The listed crowd at Aussie Stadium was 7049 but it was probably closer to 49, as the two teams clashed on a Saturday night in front of a sea of empty seats.
The Broncos didn’t have Darren Lockyer, but that wouldn’t matter. It was only Souths. They were nothing, and they were nobody.
Few players stuck around South Sydney long enough in those days to become out and out heroes to the fanbase. Even someone like Nathan Merritt, who stuck around the longest of those readmitted Rabbitohs and had the best career of any of them, spent two years at Cronulla.
Souths were forced to drag up whoever they could get, from wherever they could get them. Their wingers in this game, for example, were Wes Tillott and Garth Wood - neither of them had played in the NRL since 1999, and Wood would be better known as a boxer once his footy career wrapped up.
Their fullback was a flyweight named Roy Bell, who weighed in at 65 kgs wringing wet - that means he was giving up 11kgs to the likes of Preston Campbell. Their forwards were guys like Scott Geddes and Luke Stuart, Mark Minichiello and Justin Smith, honest and true to be sure but how could they be a match for Tallis and Civoniceva and Myers and Webb and Carlaw and Parker?
The best thing Souths had going for them in those days were Ashley Harrison, who bore the team on his shoulders near every week, a past-his-best Bryan Fletcher and their young halves - John Sutton would one day become the grand old man of the club, but even legends are young once, and if you were putting money down you would have bet that Joe Williams was going to do all kinds of wonderful things such was his prominence in everything good that happened to Souths that year.
From the start, the game was strange. Wood, who had made his first grade debut in 1997, scored the first try of his career. Bell had a blinder and snagged a double, including one slashing effort when he flew past Karmichael Hunt like he was being blown along by the breeze.
Harrison scored, and so did Fletcher, and Harrison set up a couple more for good measure, playing one of the games of his life. Brisbane were drawn into the toughest fight of all - one they never expected, but they were fortunate the Rabbitohs defence couldn’t stop a nosebleed and the teams traded tries all night.
At stumps, it was 34-all and golden point ensued. Bell nearly won it with a speculating field goal from 40 metres out, but it drifted wide. That didn’t matter though, because a draw might not be winning but it is most definitely not losing, and these Rabbitohs would take that any old day of the week. These triumphs would be minor to everybody else, but for South Sydney they meant everything.
The result didn’t change anything - the Broncos still finished third, the Rabbitohs still finished last. It didn’t mark the start of some great revival either - the Rabbitohs got smacked 62-22 by Canberra the following week. Nor was it the birth of a great, shining star for Souths - Bell only played a handful more games before leaving the league forever, Harrison departed for the hated Roosters after 2005 and Williams was gone two years later. It was just a minor triumph in the darkness, a small beacon of hope amid seasons and seasons of misery. In dark times, little wins become big and a draw can be as important as a victory.
When the Rabbitohs returned to the finals in 2007, they had just three players left from this match. When they climbed to the top of the mountain for the 21st time seven years later, Sutton was the only survivor from these horrible days. Now the Rabbitohs are rich and powerful and influential, and draws with the Broncos would be a cause of annoyance, if not concern, rather celebration.
They clawed their way out of the darkness and back into the light, and such horrific seasons are just a distant memory, because their pockets are fat and their blood is blue. They dream of winning premierships, not avoiding wooden spoons.
They left these days behind a long time ago, and there is no room for Roy Bell or Wes Tillott in the promised land.
Originally published as Campo’s Classics: For the 2004 Rabbitohs even a draw was a miracle