Buckle your seat-belt and get your heart-pills, today we're going back to September 28, 1997 (how on Earth do I remember the date? Hmmmm):
Knights v Sea Eagles, 1997 ARL Grand Final
The lead in: Manly are hot favourites to win their 2nd Premiership in 3 years- not only had beaten the Knights in 11 previous match-ups (going all the way back ro 1992)- they had only lost 11 games over the past three seasons. The two sides considered to pose the biggest threat to Manly's dominance (Sydney City and North Sydney) had both been knocked out the previous week by these respective teams. The Knights were the fairytale side into their first Grand Final, but despite the talent in their side, the enthusiastic sea of support from the Hunter (and indeed, from virtually every non-Manly fan) to back them, it was widely expected that Manly (with their miserly defence, well drilled attack and star-studded line-up under Bob Fulton's experienced guidance) would be too strong for them over the 80 minutes.
State of the game: It was the year of the “split”. It was the end to the most divisive year in League history- the Broncos had won a fairly unmemorable Super League decider against Cronulla the previous week. The home-town support for the Knights was the feel-good story of the year, at a time when the code was coming off the back of 3 years of negative publicity, dwindling crowds and split loyalties thanks to the ‘war’. Yet despite the Knights fairytale run, it was considered that Manly would be too clinical for them, win the Grand Final, and many would be happy to see the book closed on 1997, with hopes for a reunified code in ’98.
FIRST HALF- KEY MOMENTS:
- 1st minute: Paul Harragon picks up Geoff Toovey and drives him backwards, Manly players think it was a high tackle and Mark Carroll races in to seize Harragon by the collar as a scuffle breaks out. Little more than a minute in and 'Chief v Spud' has already begun. Penalty Manly. Craig Field’s kick for touch falls well short and Robbie O’Davis carts it up. Another set for the Knights as the ‘Newcastle’ chant goes up around the stadium.
- 5th minute: Spud carts the ball up- before Chief wipes him out in a monster tackle. 'Chief v Spud' part 2. The Knights defence (especially) is opening this game all guns blazing, unfazed by the occasion. Spud then knocks on clumsily at the play the ball, clearly rattled. Penalty to Newcastle. Andrew Johns takes the penalty kick 40 metres out, but it sails far to the right of the posts.
- 9th minute: Craig Innes finds a gap in the Knights’ defence, flicks it out wide to John Hopoate on the right and opposing winger Darren Albert barely gets a hand on him, Hopoate scores. Shannon Nevin converts from near the right touchline.
Manly 6-0
- 16th minute: Field is carried off with what looks to be a leg injury, at the same time Toovey is also off the field getting tended to. It doesn’t seem likely that Field will be back. Already, Manly are a player short.
- 18th minute: 10 metres from their tryline, Robbie O puts a grubber kick in goal. Nevin makes an air swing at it, the ball rolls back, Robbie O can’t get a hand to it and it rolls out just before Troy Fletcher can get a hand on it to score what would have been a welcome opening try for the Knights.
- 23rd minute: The Knights shift the ball left to right, 20 metres from their tryline. Linking up at the end is Joey Johns, who darts from the blindside and looks to score- except he is grounded by Hopoate a bees’ dick from the line- and loses the ball.
- 24th minute: From the following set, Manly make 80 metres passing the ball back and forth down the left hand corridor of the field, before Toovey offloads left to Innes in a tackle and Innes scores Manly’s second try. Nevin misses the sideline conversion attempt.
Manly 10-0
- 28th minute: Manly are penalised for offside, defending their line 20 metres out. As Joey Johns lines up the penalty attempt, Field returns. Blocker informs us that, in fact, Field only had an ankle injury that just needed painkillers. Joey kicks the penalty goal.
Manly 10-2
- 33rd minute: Robbie O, from a scrum 15 metres out, dummies then jinks right, finds a gap in the defence and leaps over the line to the left of the posts. Try to the Knights, as Robbie O dances a jig. Joey Johns nails the conversion.
Manly 10-8
- 36th minute: From the ensuing set of six, Chief drops the ball from a combined Spud/ Toovey tackle, 20 metres out from Manly’s line. No sooner have the Knights scored then Manly are right back in there looking for another try. Nick Kosef then throws a pass that is touched by a Knights player- another 6 tackles to Manly who are now just 5 metres out from their line.
37th minute: On the left hand side of the field, Cliff Lyons throws an inside ball to Nevin who makes an easy run in to score. He converts his own try. No sooner have the Knights scored, and their 6 point catch-up has come undone.
Manly 16-8.
HALFTIME: If one word had to describe this game so far? Fast! Action action action, from one end of the field to the other. The whole game has carried out at such a frantic pace and, despite a few handling errors and injuries sidelining Toovey and Field for various periods, Manly still manage to lead by 8 points. The biggest worry for a Knights fan, and the thing that should fill a Manly fan with the most hope, is that Manly haven’t been at their best, yet they’ve still managed to go into halftime leading by more than a converted try. If Manly click into gear, and get rid of the errors they made early in the first half, they could be engraving their name on the Optus Cup by the hour mark.
Across the Harbour Bridge, in their squalid apartments along Military Road, all 5 Bears fans are no doubt cursing at their TV’s, thinking of what might have been and how they could have made Manly pay for their errors- if only Matt Seers had got an extra metres’ head-start on Darren Albert the previous weekend and Jason Taylor had remembered that (unlike in Aussie Rules) you don’t get any points for missing with your kicks…classic Norths and their shit finals luck.
In between snorting rails off the arse of the high-class hooker they got to take the pain away and downing another glass of Cointreau, Roosters fans (The 5 of them who attend games, plus the other 2 in the Qantas Club lounge waiting to fly out on business) are imagining the 20 point lead they would have had over Newcastle by now. The coke buzz fuels their imaginations- Freddy would be running rings around the Knights single-handedly. Gus would be beaming in the coaches’ box like a bloated rooster. The chardonnay would be flowing in the corporate boxes (with some being deliberately tipped onto the heads of those unwashed coal-mining plebs below). The conversation would be awash with plans to meet up at Icebergs for lunch to compare Audis and discuss their stock portfolios…but money doesn’t buy everything- just ask Nick Politis. 1975 feels like so long ago…
SECOND HALF- HIGHLIGHTS:
- 45th minute: Toovey is writhing about on the turf, jersey pulled up around his mouth. Replays show that he was grabbing at the leg of Adam Macdougall as he played the ball- Mad Dog glances behind him and backwards kicks Toovey in the face. Yet the touch judges don’t say a word, as the Manly trainer runs over and helps Toovey from the field, face bloodied.
- 48th minute: Toovey returns to the field, strapped up, looking like he went to a gang fight and his gang didn’t show up.
- 49th minute: Steve Crowe and Lyons trade punches, players from both sides rush over to break up the scuffle. Replays show that Crowe hit Lyons in a late, high tackle, Lyons retaliates with a punch and that opens the floodgates. Penalty Manly.
- 54th minute: Mad Dog loses the football in a two-man tackle, 20 metres from the Knights line. It’s ruled a strip. Joey Johns sets up the penalty goal attempt, off to the left of the posts. He kicks it between the posts.
Manly 16-10
- 60th minute: The Knights are mounting pressure right on their line, when Joey flicks the ball to Adam Muir on the line but he can’t grasp it to (surely) score a try.
- 62nd minute: Chief hits Kosef in a high tackle. Manly players call for Chief to be sent off but David Manson doesn’t budge. Penalty to Manly, with Nevin lining up the attempt to the left of the posts. It misses. Albert catches the ball on the fly and proceeds to scoot 40 metres up-field. Knights are off the hook.
- 68th minute: Manly are threatening to score the try that could kill off this game. But firstly, winger Danny Moore slips 5 metres out from his line, then on the left hand side of the field (a couple of plays later) Hoppa makes a poor offload attempt that hits the ground and is wrapped up by Matthew Johns (the one who banged that Kiwi chick when he was at Cronulla and went on to have something of a TV career. Did you know he's Joey's brother?) The Knights are let off the hook once more.
- 68th minute: From the very first play-the-ball, Albert throws a spiralling pass- to nobody- that bounces dangerously into the in-goal. For a split second it looms as the Grand Final equivalent of Duke- Sigsworth ’82 revisited. But Muir wraps it up in time- then is grounded in a Manly two-man tackle moments later. Goal-line drop-out. Not for the first-time, good fortune and hard work by the Knights comes undone almost immediately. Both teams are looking well and truly battered by now. The Knights now have another Manly set of 6 to defend, with every chance that Field could go for the drop-goal. But then Kosef forces a poor offload that’s intercepted and grounded by Joey. Knights off the hook AGAIN!
- 72nd minute. With Manly less than 10 metres from their line again, on the last tackle, Lyons puts in a drop-goal attempt that looks more like a chip kick. It misses.
- 73rd minute: Caught in a tackle 5 metres from the Knights’ line, Joey offloads left and the ball is caught by Robbie O, who spins around in a covering tackle from Nevin, falls under Spud and manages to stretch out and ground the ball just on the line, brushing the goal-post padding. Try. Joey converts and it’s deadlocked with 5 to go.
16-all.
- 77th minute: The Knights, collectively, are doing everything to break the line and score what would surely be the match-winner. But Manly, likewise, give everything left of themselves in defence. Both teams are clearly running purely on adrenalin and will-to-win by now. Matthew Johns gets his hands on the ball 22 metres from the Knights line and sets up the drop-goal attempt. It arcs through the air, the noise of the crowd flares up- this could seal it- then it hits the right post and bounces back into the field of play. Lyons has the ball, but deep within Manly’s own territory.
- 79th minute: Newcastle are moving up-field, 30 metres out, with another chance to break this deadlock with virtually 30 seconds left. The other Johns brother sets up his field goal attempt- the ball flicks up from the kick but is knocked down by Manly. They survive, but the Knights have another 6 tackles with under half a minute left of regular time. 30 metres and an exhausted, but determined, Manly wall stand in the way of the Knights and glory.
- 79th minute: Joey carts the ball up from dummy half and, instead of flicking it in-field, runs down the blindside on the right. He’s tackled one on one, and offloads to Darren Albert who’s hitting full-pace to his left. Albert catches the football, takes off and hits a gap that nobody can catch him in- Manly players throw themselves at him in his wake, but he powers over the line and plants the ball dead in the middle of the in-goal.
Try!
Game over! With just 6 seconds left, at that…
To quote Rabbits Warren: “NYOOO-CARRRSTLE! HAVE WON! THE GRAAAND FINAL! NEWCASTLE! ARE THE PREMIERS! MANLY DEJECTED…NEWCARSTLE WEEEPING! WEEEPING! TEEERS ORRV JOOO-BILATION!” Joey nails the conversion after the siren, but it’s all elementary. At Newcastle Workers’ Club, Knights fans are jumping on tables hugging strangers, pooling their money for slabs of New and buckets of Henny Penny to celebrate and agreeing to turn a blind eye to the worst-kept-secret that is Joey’s behaviour- for this next week at least. Back at Moore Park, Manly players are slumped on the grass, exhausted, devastated. Toovey is feeling the pain on his bloodied face, thinking about Mad Dog stomping him- for that, there’s got to be an investigation! You’d nearly feel sorry for them if it wasn’t Manly. Hahaha God it’s so good seeing those bastards lose! You can almost picture Eric Cartman running out onto the field to lick at their eye sockets.
Meanwhile, Norths fans are either frantically calling up all their Manly supporting friends to laugh hysterically down the receiver and then hang up- or having a celebratory wank (because like every other year, they had to adopt a team for the Grand Final- and this year it was the Knights, even though they directly ended their 75th consecutive edition of “Our Year” for them. Plus, considering the way St George left them with blue balls 12 months earlier, this counts as a win! Anyway- there’s always next year. Not only that, but apparently they’re relocating to Gosford, where they’ll be a powerhouse in the years to come. Finally their luck is going to turn!)
FULLTIME: Knights 22- 16.
THE VERDICT:
This Grand Final was like a rollercoaster- the first half starts and ends in a frantic blur, then by the hour mark the play begins to slow down. But just when the game risked becoming an anti-climatic slog, instead the Knights scored twice and the last 10 minutes was an enthralling display that enscapulated the key quality that characterises Rugby League- players from both sides exhausted, barely anything left in the tank, but constantly picking themselves up and going again just because that’s the only option they had left in going for glory. Personal bias makes it difficult to judge, but surely even a neutral fan must have felt the heart pumping in the final 10 minutes of this one? Manly could just as easily have scored the knock-out try, or kicked the penalty or field goal that landed the knock-out punch- and been just as deserving winners as the Knights were. But considering the state of the game, the upheaval facing Newcastle at this point in history (with the closure of the steelworks) and the almost supernatural way a Manly wall that had been solid almost the whole game just opened up, for Darren Albert to pace through like a winning thoroughbred and seal destiny? There could have been no better ending. The first half in one word, was: fast. The whole game, in one sentence? A physically, mentally exhausting rollercoaster ride, with a fairytale at the end. What a way to close the book on a season…
Tomorrow: The 1600km local derby Grand Final...
