Cooper Cronk joins legends after heroic grand final performance

THE Sydney Roosters halfback’s powerful performance in Sunday’s NRL Grand Final was more than just heroics — it was an echo down the ages from rugby league’s most stirring moments, writes Paul Malone.

Cooper Cronk of the Roosters embraces Blake Ferguson after the Roosters’ grand final win. Picture: Getty

WHEN Sydney Roosters players tried to take as much tackling as they could off the plate of crocked Cooper Cronk in Sunday night’s grand final, it was an echo down the ages from rugby league’s most stirring moments.

With the Roosters celebrating a 21-6 win over Melbourne, coach Trent Robinson and co-captain Boyd Cordner emerged from a week of public subterfuge to concede that Cronk had played 75 minutes with a 15cm break in his left scapula, or shoulder blade.

Cronk had been defiantly courageous in lasting 40 minutes in the previous weekend’s preliminary final, much of which with his left arm dangling by his side.

NRL 2018 grand final: Cooper Cronk ‘more coach than player’

How Cooper Cronk got ready for Roosters’ NRL grand final miracle

Cameron Smith and Cooper Cronk fail to acknowledge each other in awkward grand final snubs

Cooper Cronk wins NRL grand final with Roosters despite broken scapula

The Queenslander gamely doubled-down when a midweek scan revealed the fracture.

He was named on Tuesday in his team’s No.23 jersey, the number of a reserve, rather than the No.7 he’s worn for the majority of his 348 previous NRL matches.

By Friday night, he had convinced Robinson he would be able to contribute up to a point, despite the pain.

Cronk somehow lasted the first 75 minutes of a grand final with the ever-present danger of brutal Melbourne defence before walking off with the job done.

The pain was real on Cooper Cronk’s face during the grand final showdown. Picture: AAP/Dean Lewins

Many sports have instances of players who have kept going despite broken arms or bad facial fractures. Few have the repetition of contact and the punishment of the hits which rugby league requires of its exponents.

Two of Cronk’s illustrious predecessors as Australian Test halfbacks, Peter Sterling and Andrew Johns, cautioned publicly in the week before the grand final against the Roosters fielding Cronk. Johns went as far as to say “he can’t play’’.

Eight times, Cronk, needled up with painkilling injection, made tackles on Storm players, because he had been isolated in defence or because he just had no alternative. His 2018 average is 15 tackles a game, so his teammates found ways to limit Melbourne’s success in making him tackle.

But in one tackle, the nuggety Queenslander was part of a three-man stop on the tryline on the hard-running Storm forward Nelson Asofa-Solomona, who is 22cm taller and 28kg heavier than Cronk. He rose to his feet with no expression on his face, but with a determination to be ready for the next tackle.

“I haven’t made a dominant tackle in my whole life. I shut my eyes and hoped for the best,’’ the self-deprecating Cronk said later.

“It was just the contact stuff (which hurt the most). The idea was to use me up as a decoy.’’

Cooper Cronk holds the trophy after the Roosters’ big grand final win over the Storm. Picture: Brett Costello

The Clive Churchill Medal award for the NRL grand final’s best player is named after one of the sport’s Immortals and he was no physical giant either.

Among Churchill’s many feats was to play 75 minutes of a game in 1955 with a broken forearm. At halftime, the South Sydney fullback had an ambulance man strap some cardboard exercise book covers around it as a makeshift splint.

He kicked a conversion attempt after fulltime from near the touchline which enabled his side to continue a winning streak which would culminate in a premiership. Churchill was a one-armed bandit, 63 years before the term was attached to Cronk.

At that stage of its history, league did not permit injured players to be replaced in a match. So in 1958, Brisbane’s Exhibition Ground was the stage for the stoic Great Britain captain Alan Prescott playing with a broken forearm for the last 77 minutes of a winning Test against Australia, refusing a painkilling injection at halftime.

Australian captain Brian Davies said it was not the case that he had told teammates to spare Prescott. “We couldn’t get at him,’’ Davies said.

In 1970, South Sydney captain John Sattler lasted 77 minutes, as well, in a grand final despite the agony of a broken jaw, inflicted behind the play by a punch from Manly’s John Bucknall.

In his 2014 autobiography “Glory, Glory’’, Sattler detailed prodding around with a finger inside his mouth and finding a “hole that should not be there — a gush of blood spewed onto my jumper’’.

Souths legend Clive Churchill played 75 minutes of a game with a broken forearm in 1955.

Captain John Sattler is chaired from the field with a broken jaw by his teammates in 1970.

A shaken Sattler soon told teammate Mike Cleary to hold him up. An aghast Cleary told him to leave the field.

“He knows my mantra, South Sydney’s mantra — never show those opposition pricks you are hurt,’’ Sattler told co-author Peter Badel.

“Walking off is tantamount to giving up.’’

Fellow prop John O’Neill told Sattler to “stay out of the way _ I’ll take the hit-ups’’.

O’Neill’s sentiment was that which, 48 years later, had been at the heart of what the Roosters were willing to do to keep Cronk, clever and a serial winner, on the field.

On a video replay, Badel counted Sattler making 20 tackles, missing only two, taking the ball up eight times and packing into the front-row of scrums _ almost all with a triple break of the jaw.

League has many modern-day tales of bravery, albeit not as bloody as the Sattler epic.

Darren Lockyer’s last act as a Broncos player was to kick a matchwinning field goal in 2011 with a broken cheekbone which prevented him from playing the next week in a preliminary final.

Souths captain Sam Burgess played out the 2014 grand final legend despite a fractured eye socket and fractured cheekbone.