Crash Craddock: Rugby league’s greatest feuds
Rugby league is a brutal game made even tougher by the unique battles between players, coaches or even referees. Robert Craddock looks at the game’s best rivalries to grace the turf, or stands.
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The late, great Brisbane boxing promoter Reg Layton used to whip up interest in his Festival Hall fights by stridently declaring “there’s real hatred between these two’’.
The trouble was he used the line so often it was hard to tell what was real.
There were times when a Mexican fighter who could hardly speak English would arrive in town and when you asked him why he hated the local boy so much he would say “hate him? I’ve actually never met him’’.
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But sometimes the dislike is real and that is why the feud between the Broncos coach Anthony Seibold and Souths coaching duo Wayne Bennett and Jason Demetriou was so absorbing during the week.
It was entertaining and revealing but most of all it was unvarnished reality.
In a game which has been thriving on bushfires for 100 years this was a rare case when coaches cut through the tiresome political correctness which shackles our civilised world and actually said what they really thought.
In time this rivalry may grow into status worthy of a podium finish in rugby league’s most famous fallouts but it has a lot to beat, including …
Mark “Spud’’ Carroll and Paul Harragon:
They played together in State of Origin but Matty Johns once claimed in the 1995 series when they were teammates the duo never spoke to each other and that Carroll admitted he would occasionally wake up in the night with his fists clenched thinking of you know who.
Johns said he realised the depth of their dislike when he was talking to Carroll on a team bus and turned to see Harragon staring a hole through him.
Paul Gallen and Cameron Smith:
Gallen considers Smith the best player he has seen but he relishes trying to get under his skin like this season going public with an alleged sharp on-field exchange of words he overheard between Smith and Cameron Munster. Even last week he spoke of how Smith “just makes every tackle so messy’’ by acting as if he’s falling when in fact he is “so good he would not fall over anything’’.
The Storm versus the Broncos:
This one is fought out well away from public view but it’s there and it’s raw and real. The Broncos reckon the Storm have piggy-backed their way to glory by building their club on key Broncos players and executives like Glenn Lazarus, Chris Johns and John Ribot as well as shrewdly plucking and developing a host of Queensland’s legends.
Steve Walters and Benny Elias:
Different sorts of characters but their rivalry for the Test hooking spot made them intense rivals. The story goes that Elias taunted Walters in a scrum that he was not even the best hooker in his own family (brother Kerrod was a hooker) while Walters responded with “easy on mate … I’ve got a Test match to play next week’’.
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Benny Elias and Mario Fenech:
This one was even more spirited than the Walters-Elias feud. They went hard at each other for over a decade. Fists occasionally flew and it was reported but never confirmed then when Fenech was sent off in a semi-final against Elias he actually bit his own hand and blamed his rival.
Bill Harrigan and Bob Fulton:
Harrigan was rugby league’s best referee for almost two decades but in his second season in first grade in 1987 when he refereed a Cronulla-Manly match where Manly were hammered 13-4 in the penalties and duly lost, prompting their coach Fulton to declare “I hope you get hit by a cement truck”. The feud lingered to the point where 23 years later Fulton called Harrigan “a blight on the game” after Harrigan made a contentious video referring decision against the Sea Eagles in 2010.
Originally published as Crash Craddock: Rugby league’s greatest feuds