Sydney Rooster Victor Radley a local hero with fear factor zero

Forget Cooper Cronk. Roosters fans are focused on their home-grown hit machine, Victor Radley.

Clovelly Crocodiles junior players, left to right: Rugby Mangan, Yestyn Ryan, Harper Warnock, Maxim Mitsios and Louis Fox at Burrows Park in Sydney’s east. Picture: John Feder

The fairytale? You can have the injured superstar trying to get on the field thanks to painkillers, magic sponges and courage. You can have the legendary veteran embarking on one for the road while everyone blows their trumpets and sounds their horns. But for genuinely spine-tingling, heart-melting romanticism before tomorrow night’s NRL grand final, nothing tops the yarn about the wild child who became a local hero.

Victor Radley was a fearless little tacker playing for the ­Clovelly Crocodiles at a beautiful, oceanside, postage stamp-sized ground called Burrows Park in Sydney’s eastern suburbs when parents of opposition players first started sneaking up to his coach, the respected former Sydney Roosters player Adrian Lam, to ask him to tell the miniature tearaway to stop tackling so hard. Someone was going to get hurt.

More often than not, it was Radley who hit the deck and stayed there. He threw himself into the fray so fiercely that he kept knocking himself out. Under Lam’s guidance from the age of six, Radley learnt proper defensive techniques. He progressed through the age groups at the Crocodiles, a 101-year-old club that has punched above its weight to survive, without attracting too much attention.

Roosters’ Victor Radley. Picture: Getty Images

Representative selectors booed Radley. He played footy all winter and surfed at Bronte all summer, as local as you could get. But the fearlessness and physicality of the bloke made him a late bloomer, and while he’s small by NRL standards — 92kg and 182cm — he earned a contract with the Roosters last year.

Now he’s entering a whole new realm. Radley lines up in ­tomorrow night’s blockbuster grand final against the Melbourne Storm as the Roosters’ only born-and-bred local junior. So while Roosters halfback Coop­er Cronk dominates the build-up with his battle against injury, and the Storm’s Billy Slater prepares for his final match before retirement, in the heartland of Roosters territory Radley is front and centre. The local kid who’s grown up to play for the local professional team … and he may just win the comp.

Lam has seen and done it all in rugby league, but the rise and rise of Radley gives him goose bumps.

“He’s the best story in the NRL,” Lam says. “No one’s really seen the full picture yet.

“Give it a few years and Victor Radley will be one of the most popular players the Roosters have ever had. It’ll spread beyond the club. He’s one of a kind.

“He’s one of the toughest players I’ve been involved with. He gives hope to every small kid who thinks they don’t have enough size. If you’ve got enough heart, you’re a chance. Big kids used to run at him and pick on him and he’d put them on their backsides.

“Pardon the language, but you can see what he’s thinking: f..k this, I don’t care how big you are, run at me. He grew up doing it for the Crocodiles. Now he’s doing it for the Roosters.”

He will have the No 13 on his back tomorrow night while little tackers from today’s Crocodiles, in their Roosters face paint and Crocs jerseys, will see where it’s possible to go from little old Burrows Park.