Campo’s Classics: Parramatta Eels vs North Queensland Cowboys, 2005 preliminary final
The footy is gone and it might not be back for some time. This week we were supposed to see the Eels tackle the Cowboys at their shiny new stadium — instead we turn back the clock to a classic clash.
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The footy is gone, we don’t know when it’ll come back and that absolutely sucks.
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 North Queensland were supposed to take on Parramatta, so let’s turn back to the 2005 preliminary final.
When I say 2005, you think Wests Tigers, right?
Yeah, you do. I know you do. Why wouldn’t you? Has any team ever had a higher approval rating than Tim Sheens’ lunatic attacking machine? Everyone loves Benji Marshall, and that started in 2005. If not for some twists of fate, Scott Prince would have been the Australian halfback for 10 years and he was so, so much more fun than you remember, I promise he was.
Brett Hodgson scored, and I’m quoting from the record book here, a veritable shitload of points. Pat Richards was banging drop-outs 70 metres on the fly. Todd Payten remains the largest halfback who ever lived. They were young and fresh and exciting, playing with a free spirit and exuberance that no other premiership team has matched in the years since, and they’ll remain beloved as long as there’s people around to love things.
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What was supposed to happen that year was St George Illawarra, after years of underachieving, were going to put it together and play Parramatta in the grand final.
The Eels were minor premiers on the back of Tim Smith enjoying the best rookie season of any player in the history of the game. That’s better than Payne Haas, better than Daly Cherry-Evans, better than anybody who has ever played this sport. Smith was a nobody at the start of 2005 — by the end, he’d accumulated 48 try assists, a record to this day, and one that might never be broken. Smith was a sharp runner and passed well, but his real gift was his kicking game: he had the ability to set up tries with kicks that had no name, weird, screwing grubbers or cross-field kicks that we lacked the ability to label.
The only other player who had done that before was Andrew Johns. Calling someone the next Andrew Johns is a death sentence, but that’s what Tim Smith looked like. That might seem crazy now, but it was true then. You had to be there to see it, because there’s no Tim Smith highlight reels out there, and if you weren’t there I feel bad for you.
Plus there was the enigmatic Eric Grothe, blessed with incredible gifts but cursed with an inability to apply them, and Timana Tahu, a bolt of lightning who exploded without warning, and Ben Smith, who became a hardworking backrower but back then was a blockbusting centre.
Add to that guys like Dean Widders, the king of the supersubs, and Nathan Hindmarsh and Nathan Cayless and Mark Riddell and Parramatta had a very serious footy team. There were enough veterans of the semi-final losses from 1998, 1999 and 2000, plus the grand final defeat of 2001, for all the Eels to understand what it took to be among the competition’s best while retaining the hunger of the challenger, but not so many that the scars ran too deep. They were the minor premiers, the Dragons finished second, and the future seemed so clear you could reach out and touch it.
Two well-supported clubs steeped in history, both nursing long premiership droughts, meeting on rugby league’s biggest day would have had the NRL salivating. The Dragons ended up falling short, as they so often did in those days, when the Tigers did them 20-12 in the prelim off the back of a Dene Halatau double. No matter, they must have said down at the league offices. The Tigers can fill the bill, and an all-Western Sydney battle is still money. Hindmarsh wasn’t playing, but that didn’t matter. Who are the Eels playing? The Cowboys? Parramatta beat them 50-12 in their only meeting that year. What the hell are the Cowboys doing here?
Things are different now, because so much has happened to the Cowboys since then, but in 2005 they were still very much the end of the rugby league universe. But this was before all that, before premierships and Dally M’s and new stadiums and statues of Johnathan Thurston and record contracts for Jason Taumalolo and all the rest.
It took nine years for North Queensland to make the finals for the first time and they were nine of the most wretched years a team could have. From 1995 to 2003 the Cowboys’ highest finish was 10th — and that came during Super League, which was a 10-team competition, so they came dead last.
That was one of three wooden spoons they got in those early years and as fanatical as their support was at home, outside of the north they may well have not existed.
Here’s a stat that should still blow your mind — the Cowboys did not have a free to air game from their first match, against the Bulldogs in 1995, until 2004. Nine years of being relegated to the back of the Fox Sports schedule. You remember how they used to have a delayed game on Super Saturday? Two games would kick off at 7:30, and whichever one was deemed worse would be delayed and shown at 9:30. That was Cowboys country. That was where they lived. They existed all the way up there, far removed from finals and premierships and all of that, and they bothered nobody and nobody bothered them.
Things started changing in 2004, when they made the finals and beat the Broncos for the first time on a seminal night for the club, and it kept changing in 2005 when they signed Thurston.
It was a genuine debate, back in 2005, about which halfback you would rather have for the next 10 years, Smith or Thurston. Even after Thurston won the Dally M and played well in his debut Origin series for Queensland, it was still a debate. Now, Thurston is inseparable from all the things we have seen him do, and all the times we saw him do it. But back then he was a player without history, just like Smith, and those players are easier to dream on but harder to predict.
It would be wrong to think of the Cowboys as the Johnathan Thurston Show, because before they were his they belonged to Matt Bowen. He was the club’s first homegrown star, and without him none of this would be possible in the first place because it was Bowen who laid the foundation, it was Bowen who showed somebody from the Cowboys could stay at the Cowboys and still be one of the best things going around. Thurston took North Queensland to another level, but they wouldn’t have had the capacity to go to that level if Bowen hadn’t been there first.
The Eels whooped Manly in the first week of the finals to skate through the prelim and the fifth-placed Cowboys lost to the fourth-placed Tigers 50-6. That’s not a typo, it was 50-6, fifty points, that’s five zero, to six. Thanks to the gloriously deranged McIntrye system, North Queensland were not eliminated and were instead pitched into a sudden-death final against the Storm at the Sydney Football Stadium, of all places. They won a game that never amounted to much, and returned to Sydney a week later so they could get dismembered by the Eels, go home quietly and give Parramatta a shot at the title. That’s what was supposed to happen.
In the first few minutes, Smith hung a kick out for Grothe. It was the sort of kick he’d nailed all year, a fancy cross-field thing, and Matt Sing, who saved as many tries as he ever scored and he scored a lot, was too far in-field to do anything about it. Smith had been on the money with it all year, but he wasn’t this time, and it sailed over Grothe’s head and into touch. The omens were all around us, if only we could see them.
Bowen was in rare form all through 2005 and he turned it up in the finals but his opening try wasn’t anything particularly flash. He was out at second-receiver, maybe 20 metres out from the line, caught a long pass from Thurston with plenty of room, and an absolutely terrified Daniel Wagon raced out of the line to try and shut it down. Bowen slid past him before he even caught the ball. He had him beaten before the footy was in his hands. It was so absurdly easy it does not seem like it should be allowed. Tries are supposed to be hard to come by in preliminary finals. They aren’t supposed to be that simple.
Rod Jensen went over next, just by hitting it up through the centre of the ruck. A one-time winger or centre who played plenty of reserve grade, Jensen found a home at the Cowboys as a blockbusting, sparkplug of a bench backrower. He scored 11 tries in 2005, and none were as important as this one.
Then Brett Firman got over under the posts just before half-time, and all he had to do was straighten off his left foot from about 10 metres out and run. Saying Parramatta parted like the Red Sea is an insult to Moses, because the sea needed to be parted in the first place. Parramatta just opened up. There’s a reason this game isn’t remembered as Thurston’s first dominant finals performance, because it wasn’t, and there’s a reason it doesn’t live on the highlight reels, because for the most part all the tries are pretty standard. But the tries, and the game, are special because of what they meant, not how they happened. This is a game that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Firman had joined the club mid-season from the Roosters, where he was supposed to help replace Brad Fittler until it became clear that was a fantasy. He started from the bench, with backrower Justin Smith lining up at five-eighth and Thurston at halfback. It was weird, but it worked.
Ty Williams just about put it beyond doubt when he scored after half-time. It was the 52nd of 54 tries Williams, Bowen and Sing would score between them that season. Thurston kicked a field goal, left-footed cause why not, to stretch the lead to 23 before he put Josh Hannay over for the final try of the day.
It is fitting that Hannay got on the scoresheet. He was as much a part of the old Cowboys as Thurston and Bowen were a bridge to the new. Before Thurston ripped up the record books, Hannay held almost all the pointscoring marks the club had to offer. He’d first been selected for first grade as a 16-year old in 1996, but the ARL refused to let him take the field.
Even now, he is the second-most prolific point scorer in Cowboys history and his 49 tries are third among players who played for North Queensland before Thurston joined the club. After this day Hannay only played 10 more games for the Cowboys. He was part of the old world, and there was no place for him in the future, but at this time, and in this place, where what had been met what could be to form what was, he had a moment all to himself.
The final score was 29-0. Since mandatory grand finals were introduced in 1955, it is the second-greatest loss any minor premier has ever suffered in the finals, bettered only by Melbourne’s 40-0 loss in the grand final three years later.
Watch the post-match footage and you can see the Parramatta players wandering around in a daze, as they had for much of the match. It must be such a powerless feeling, to play in a game like that and know that anything you do cannot stem the tide, like the heavens have ordained things must go one way, and you beat on like a boat against the current and despite all your effort and desire and all the rest it doesn’t make a difference. Sometimes things are set to go one way, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. North Queensland gunned them down in the streets at high noon. They were too quick on the draw.
Smith was never that good again, not even close. He had some good days, but few great ones, and once he left the Eels in 2008 to bounce around between Cronulla and England it was clear he didn’t have another season like 2005 in the tank.
North Queensland lost the grand final, and the Tigers became the beloved team they still are today. The Cowboys were not the public favourites, they were the villains. Imagine, the Cowboys being villains. It had never happened before, and it surely will not happen again.
That grand final run was the start of a journey that didn’t fully end until 2015, when Thurston kicked the Cowboys to their first premiership and confirmed a legacy that was already indisputable unless you were an idiot trying to start fights for no reason.
There were no other players from 2005 on that premiership squad. Matt Scott played three games that season, but it’s not the same. None of the players from that Parramatta game were even in the league anymore. Thurston was the last of them, and the best.
It was midway through that finals series, when Thurston was cementing his legend, that Tim Smith played his final top-flight match. On the same day Thurston was locked in a life-or-death struggle with the Broncos in the first week of the finals in front of a packed house at Brisbane’s temple to rugby league excellence, Smith was lining up for Wakefield against Widnes before a crowd of 3,365. Trinity lost 46-4, and Smith was sacked weeks later.
Smith was only 30. Once 2005 was just a memory, he was never again compared to Andrew Johns, or pitched into debates as an alternative to Johnathan Thurston. He was there, and he was everything, and then he was gone and he never came back.
NORTH QUEENSLAND 29 (M.Bowen, R.Jensen, B.Firman, T.Williams, J.Hannay, Hannay 4/6 goals, J.Thurston field goal) def. PARRAMATTA 0. Stadium Australia. Crowd: 44,327