This article was first published in 2020.
Just last week Rabbitohs flyer Alex Johnston did what others before him couldn’t, yet barely anyone blinked.
They raved about the pass from his teammate, part-time fullback and full-time headline magnet Latrell Mitchell, which whistled across the back line.
It created a bit of space for Johnston on the wing, who dashed 15 metres to the line, leapt in the air and grounded the ball with one hand while his body clattered into the corner post, Storm defenders trying to bundle him into touch.
Long before COVID-19, these aerial feats were rugby league's new normal.
Peter Sterling casually mentioned it wouldn't have been a try in the 1980s, his comment ironically coming almost 10 years to the day since rugby league's rulemakers made the corner post redundant.
That decision was also rubber-stamped mid-season, like this year's controversial switch to one referee and the six-again implementation.
Success has many fathers, but who was really responsible for the corner post rule that revolutionised try-scoring?
Well, it depends who you ask.
Long-time commentator Andrew Voss campaigned for the rule to be changed, in his words, for more than a decade. Voss, who now calls NRL matches for Fox League, started lobbying after the video referee was in place for a unified competition in 1998, the first after the Super League war.
“I was just on the high horse. El Masri was the prophet that said wingers would start diving from 10 metres out."
Commentator Andrew Voss
In later years he would agitate NRL officials most pre-seasons and then pose regular teasers on the old Sunday Roast program on Nine, which would often air vision of corner posts askew and even lying flat on the ground.
Much to Voss' displeasure, rugby union got in first in making the corner post a decorational guide point only.
Former Wallabies coach Rod Macqueen chaired an IRB law review panel in 2006 and having identified the corner post as anachronistic, trials in 2007 led to the rule being changed globally in 2008.
It only fuelled Voss' determination. A couple of years before Bulldogs legend Hazem El Masri retired, Voss interviewed the goalkicking freak at a café on Sydney’s lower north shore. He couldn’t resist asking one of the game’s best wingers what would happen if the corner post was rendered not in the field of play, the winger himself denied a try a couple of weeks earlier.
“El Magic” forecast flankers would be leaping through the air from metres out in an attempt to score tries.
“I was just on the high horse,” Voss jokes. “But he was the prophet that said wingers would start diving from 10 metres out. He was exaggerating, but how true he was on that sentiment.
“Everyone at Channel Nine will tell you … I’d driven them mad. I went on a crusade for all of 12 years. Matty Johns and I posed a question one week, ‘what if a defender removed the corner post out of the ground and hit the ball carrier with it, would that player be out?’ We said he’d be out.
“Then just out of the blue they changed it. I shed a tear when it happened.”
Very rugby league-like, the rule was changed between the first and second State of Origin matches that year as the Queensland juggernaut marched to a fifth straight series victory.
Voss remembers being baffled by the timing, mainly because he'd been banging on about it for years and he couldn’t remember a controversial incident in the weeks prior.
Yet there was a tipping point.
The NRL’s current general manager of competition and operations, Nathan McGuirk, was sitting in his loungeroom one Sunday afternoon. He was watching the TV as the Bulldogs embarrassed the Roosters in an early-season match at ANZ Stadium.
Ben Barba latched onto a short kick near halfway and sprinted down the touchline, just beating the cover defence of Todd Carney to notch a hat-trick of tries a few minutes from full-time. The Bulldogs won 60-14.
McGuirk noticed as Barba scored in the north-west corner of the Olympic stadium he almost clipped a corner post with VB branding, about as upright as a Saturday afternoon regular with a skinful under his belt. He fretted.
What if Barba did happen to accidentally brush the corner post? How would they handle the outrage if an incident like that decided a close game?
It ended up being the last try in a 46-point blowout that changed everything.
“I watched it and thought, ‘oh, if he hits that we’ve got to take that try off him’,” McGuirk recalls. “Ben Barba had no understanding of the corner post or what the rule was.
“Back in those days we’d just added the sponsorship bolsters around the outside of the corner posts, which were just cardboard. When they were getting wet at the base they were beginning to lean – and lean either out of the field or into the field.”
The NRL usually discussed any rule change proposals with the clubs at an end-of-year conference. The process was informal, and nothing like the competition committee structure in place these days where a select group of administrators, coaches and former legends discuss any changes to the game before sending a submission to the Australian Rugby League Commission for approval.
It has truly been one of the great innovations of the game and we see the best examples of the athleticism of our game almost weekly.
Graham Annesley
McGuirk phoned the NRL’s chief operating officer at the time, Graham Annesley, and warned him of the Barba incident. Annesley, now the NRL’s head of football, immediately took it to Australian Rugby League boss Geoff Carr, who sought an interim amendment to the international rules governing the game.
A couple of months later it was done. By accident, the NRL had created the best advertisement it could imagine.
“When we made it we didn’t really have any foresight of the positive, unintended consequences of players leaping in the air and acrobatics of what actually ended up happening,” McGuirk says.
“It was merely just to stop some of those one per cent type issues on game day where a corner post leaning in either direction could impact the outcome of the game by either denying a try or giving a team an advantage if it’s leaning the other way.”
The very next year a little Canterbury fullback named Ben Barba, who had no idea he was the reason the rule changed, scored a try which showed exactly why it was changed.
In commentary, Phil Gould was almost speechless - can you remember the last time? - as he watched the slow motion replay.
He’s in the air, he’s in the air, he’s in air. What about that? Oh, oh, oh … look at that. Can you believe it?
A rich seam
Wayne Bennett looked rugby league journeyman Nathan Ross in the eye one day and told him he would never make it in the NRL.
Bennett is the most successful coach in the game’s history, but the mop-haired coalminer refused to give up. He first got his break at Newcastle on a train-and-trial deal, turning up for sessions after 14-hour overnight shifts underground.
At age 27 and long after Bennett had left Newcastle, Ross made his NRL debut. He quickly became a cult hero in the Hunter before medically retiring last year, playing 60 games more than Bennett thought he would.
But he’ll best be remembered for a miraculous Superman try he scored against the Dragons in 2016, leaping from at least three metres out, his body soaring above and then on top of the corner post as he planted the ball under his right hand. The match was played weeks before the Olympic Games were due to start.
Is there another seat on the plane to Rio for the high jump?
Ross did briefly dabble in an Olympic sport which involved acrobatics, but it wasn’t high jump.
“I went to a Catholic school and during summertime you had to wear long pants and a short sleeve shirt,” Ross says. “We had to play Saturday sport, which was a requirement of everyone who went to the school.
“I used to be a bit of a surfer and I hated giving up my Saturdays to play basketball or cricket during the summer. I was walking past the swimming pool at the beginning of summer and there was a sign saying springboard diving tryouts.
“I went down and asked the teacher and she said the diving competition was on Thursday night and they trained Monday and Wednesday lunchtime. I was like, ‘sign me up’.
“I ended up representing NSW Catholic Schools. I only made it because three people turned up at the tryouts. I was the worst out of everyone there. But being comfortable in that equilibrium upside down is something I’ve always been used to.
“For that try I had a look at where I was and just took flight. I just kept my eyes on where the ball was going to go down. It was millimetres inside the sideline. I’d like to say it was something I practised, but it wasn’t. It was just, ‘pull the trigger, a hit and hope’ ... and it came off.”
Learning on the fly
Very few NRL wingers admit to practising their flying leaps on padded mats and in foam pits, despite many having perfected the art.
The Sharks sent their back five to undertake a number of movement pattern sessions at the local PCYC club during the 2016 pre-season, the year they would finally break their premiership duck. The group included try-scoring sensation Valentine Holmes and one Ben Barba.
The technique of leaping off the inside foot and holding the ball in one hand, preferably the outside hand, achieves two aims.
The first is to have most of your body weight on the side in which defenders are scrambling to make a last-ditch tackle, allowing more stability when off the ground. It gives them a better chance to brace for contact when it comes while they're in the air.
Every one of Hazem El Masri's 159 NRL tries came before the 2010 rule change. The athletic fan favourite retired the year before.Credit: Tim Clayton
The second benefit is the hand furthest away from the defenders can ground the ball on an exact spot, so close to the touch in goal line – sometimes millimetres inside – while being spared from the majority impact of the collision.
“You have to be a lot more precise in the area you want to put the ball down,” says former Dragons winger Jason Nightingale, who scored 110 NRL tries while playing either side of the corner post rule change.
“The further your arm and ball goes across the sideline, the more chance you’ve got of losing control. It wasn’t really a technique you trained to implement, it’s more a mindset shift and that’s what you’ve seen. We were excited when it came in because it was finally a rule for the wingers.”
Adds Raiders flyer Jordan Rapana: “Wingers these days have to be quite athletic, but really 90 per cent of it is just instinct.”
A wing and a prayer
Wingers, it used to be said, were only blokes who used to hang around with footballers. But the corner post revolution has played a large part in at changing that oft-used cliche.
Now, wingers regularly touch the ball more than front-row forwards, asked to help their side from deep in their own territory early in tackle counts. They handle possession more than centres, who once commanded salaries far bigger than the men playing outside them. The gap is narrowing.
Statistics provided by Champion Data show wingers are scoring a greater percentage of overall tries in recent years than before 2010, the year the corner post was deemed not in play.
Former Dragons winger Jason Nightingale's 110-try career straddled both sides of the rule change.Credit: Dallas Kilponen
Up until the rule change, wingers scored 27.4 per cent of tries from the start of 2008 until the mid-season shift. After a period of adjustment, wingers have scored 30 per cent of tries since the start of the 2013 season.
El Masri knew what the NRL didn’t.
He retired at the end of 2009 having scored a remarkable 159 NRL tries, every one having to skirt inside the corner post without so much as glancing it. He perfected the art of diving low and almost skimming across the turf and try line, but wonders what would have happened if he had a chance to fly through the air like the current crop.
“I said to [Voss], ‘wingers will be diving from 10 metres away, they’ll be up in the air as well with these somersaults’,” El Masri recalls. “I wanted it to be changed then.
“I often remember the corner post being on [an] angle leaning infield and I would often step back inside to avoid the sideline or the corner post. It’s one rule that should have been introduced a long time ago. It might have added a few more to the tally as well.”
It might have also added a few more to the tallies of Ken Irvine, Eric Grothe and Wendell Sailor, who could have benefited just as South Sydney speedster Johnston did last week.
“I can imagine Ken Irvine would have brilliant at this type of thing,” Voss says. “He’s already scored a million tries, would he have scored a few more? Possibly yes.”
'It's such a spectacular bit of play'
This weekend the four corner posts will be driven into the ground at three venues in NSW, merely markers to measure whether a kick finds touch or goes dead. Apart from that they’re just there to highlight how incredible the athletes who play rugby league are these days.
“It has truly been one of the great innovations of the game and we see the best examples of the athleticism of our game almost weekly,” Annesley says.
Voss will be in the commentary box, again charged with telling the viewers something before they can see it for themselves.
“Now you reckon 99 times out of 100 they’ve scored,” he says. “Most of them say they don’t practise it, but I reckon they do. If they’re not doing it at training I reckon they have the lounge room with the pillows and cushions off the sofa. They’re diving because I know the kids do.
“I really believe with our Dally Ms there’s a chance to have the best corner try of the year voted on by the fans. It’s such a spectacular bit of play.
“The only problem is rugby union beat rugby league to the rule change at the time, which I thought was an embarrassment. That really was a disgrace.”
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