It's been 40 years since NRL's Grand Finalists have both fielded Poms
Grantlee Kieza
The Courier-Mail
September 28, 2012 12:00AM
HARVEY Howard was up in the stand at Old Trafford, fighting off the approaching winter chill and watching St Helens' big blond battering ram James Graham bouncing into the attack like an albino jack-in-the-box.
It was at last year's Super League grand final and the Broncos 2000 premiership-winning prop had a special interest in proceedings since his old team Leeds were running over Saints, where the bloke sitting next to him, Darren Britt, had finished his career after stints at the Bulldogs and Magpies.
Darren's son Dean Britt, then 17, was all ears and black eyes watching Graham as well, since only a few days earlier Darren had snapped his son's nose back into place after it had been smashed all over his face in a junior match featuring NSW country players in the UK. Darren reckoned it was always best to fix a broken nose when the damage was still fresh.
Graham was giving an exhibition to the 69,000 fans on how to remain in one piece while causing mass collisions.
"We watched Graham closely," Howard recalls from his new home at Bowral, an hour south of Sydney where he is the coaching director for Group 6 rugby league.
"He excites me because he's got the explosive power of the modern game but he's like the old Pommy players from the early days with the ball skills.
"They could all slip a ball away in a tackle. It was in their genes. They had that upper body strength to hit the collision and still make the ball available for the other players around them, all the time creating something out of nothing.
"Smart coaches utilise players like that for maximum impact off the bench."
Bulldogs coach Des Hasler plans to use Graham off the bench against the Storm in Sunday's grand final just as Wayne Bennett used Horward for a sudden explosion in the 2000 decider against the Roosters.
It will be the first time since 1973 that both teams contesting the NRL's ultimate prize will field Englishmen.
The last time saw Manly's baby-faced assassin from Castleford, Malcolm Reilly, line up against Cronulla's St Helens duo of Tommy Bishop and Cliff Watson, and flying English winger Bob Wear. Though Reilly was off early.
The toughest thing from Castleford since the weather had led the Sea Eagles to their first premiership the year before, was subdued against the Sharks by some well-placed knees to the kidneys.
All these years later Bishop, who says he spent his first 27 years under an umbrella in Yorkshire and is now happily sun-kissed on the Gold Coast, can hardly contain his glee.
"Mal absolutely destroyed many teams," he said. "In those days our motto was if you copped one you gave two back so we weren't sorry to see him limp off." Still, Manly won despite his absence.
Melbourne are pinning much hope on Sunday on the scrumbase pairing of Queensland's Cooper Cronk and Gareth Widdop, a 23-year-old who was a junior gymnastics champion in Yorkshire and learnt to tackle as a boy chasing sheep on his parents' farm outside Halifax.
Widdop has been as slippery as Graham was earlier in the season before the NRL ordered him to stop coating his legs with petroleum jelly, but Graham's brief is to cause physical mayhem on Sunday.
The bruising behemoth won a 2006 Super League grand final with St Helens before losing the next five deciders and is fired up to make this weekend a winner just like Harvey Howard was, running on to Sydney's Olympic Stadium before a crowd of 94,277 in 2000.
Howard was the only Englishman in the NRL that year and Bennett needed reinforcements for the finals after Shane Webcke and Petero Civoniceva had broken their arms. He'd already had stints at Widnes, Leeds and the Bradford Bulls in England, and in Sydney at Easts and Wests where he was coached by one of the maddest characters he'd ever met in Tommy Raudonikis and played alongside one of the shrewdest in Des Hasler.
He was also no stranger to pain, charging into opposition packs in Australia and his home country, and in his spare time keeping millions of bees as an apiarist, putting up with the frequent stings to snaffle the honey.
But being whacked from Widnes to Warrington, getting slammed from Campbelltown to Castleford had not prepared him for the full force of Bennett's Broncos.
Before his only season at Red Hill began, Howard hauled his white legs and 110kg on to the Broncos team bus and headed down with the boys to the Army's Canungra Jungle Training Centre in the Gold Coast hinterland, unsure of what the 2000 NRL season had in store.
For three days he and his fellow Broncos slogged and slid and slithered their way through the muddy military torture trials, all the time Gorden Tallis laughing his head off at big Harvey's predicament.
"I thought Queensland was the hottest place in the world," Howard says, "and I didn't think those three days would end.
"But after it was over, Wayne Bennett said nothing we would face all season would be tougher than what we'd just been through. And he was right."
Howard's father, Brian, had played at Wembley for St Helens and Harvey had also savoured the big match occasion there, listening to the massive crowd singing Abide with Me and being introduced to Prince Philip.
But nothing had prepared him for the speed and intensity of an Australian grand final. Webcke played with a custom-made armguard over his broken arm and Howard made enough trips from the bench to be the most productive interchange player in the game, with 21 tackles and 10 hit-ups as the Broncos won 14-6.
Broncos Test prop Gavin Allen remarked after the game: "In a grand final you need a bloke who can just tuck it under his wing, take the damn thing forward and get a quick play-the-ball. I think Harvey is the best at that I have seen, apart from Glenn Lazarus."
The game was a great spectacle but it all happened so quickly Howard didn't get much of a chance to savour it. "Before I knew it we were going up to collect the grand final ring and doing the lap of honour," he says. "But I'll never forget the trophy sitting in its own seat on the flight home to Brisbane and all the people slapping the side of our bus to celebrate at the airport. It was such a great feeling."
Only nine other Englishmen have shared that feeling of winning a grand final in Australian rugby league.
St Helens second-rower Dick Huddart was the first, bringing his knees-up running style to the Dragons after the retirement of Norm Provan and scoring a first-half try against the Tigers as his team won their 11th consecutive premiership in 1966. Wigan halfback Dave Bolton was on the losing end that day but won a premiership with Balmain three years later.
Reilly was Manly's hired gun for the 1972-73 seasons and wiped out the opposition any way he could until the Sharks ambushed him in the '73 decider.
Manly second-rower Peter Peters remembered Watson, with the long sideburns and moustache looking like a mad pirate as he smashed head-on with Manly's John O'Neill, their collisions shaking the ground in the dirtiest grand final in history.
"You could hear bones breaking as elbows, knees and fists were used in every tackle," Peters recalled.
Watson had been leaning against an advertising hoarding in the moments before kick-off seemingly without a care in the world.
"Cliff smoked back then and he was so relaxed," Bishop recalled, "I was surprised he wasn't having a cigarette while we warmed up."
Now enjoying retirement just down the road from Cronulla's clubhouse, 72-year-old Watson says: "I had to play 80 minutes of football so I didn't want to wear myself out doing any exercises before the kick-off. Back in England I'd play 43 matches a season even before I'd play matches for Great Britain.
"In those days it was a very tough game but the thing I most remember when I first got to Australia was that the ground was so much harder here than the soft grass in England. But England players were always tough, hard men."
Manly had such a good experience with their imported muscle that for the 1976 grand final against Parramatta they used three Englishmen, Hull Kingston Rovers second-rowers Phil Lowe and Steve "Knocker" Norton, and Castleford halfback Gary Stephens.
Eleven years later the Sea Eagles flew in Castleford prop Kevin Ward for the grand final to add starch to a pack that already had Phil Daley, Noel Cleal, Ron Gibbs and Fatty Vautin, and which ultimately overpowered a Raiders side coached by Don Furner and Bennett.
Balmain coach Warren Ryan was hoping for the same sort of match-winning effort from Leeds speedster Ellery Hanley in the grand final the following year but Bulldog Terry Lamb threw a spanner in the works and a right forearm at the English wizard, who spent most of the match concussed in the dressingroom, the Tigers eventually losing 24-12.
Since then Sheffield hooker Lee Jackson won a premiership playing as a reserve forward with Newcastle in 1997 in a team coached by Mal Reilly, Howard won with the Broncos in 2000 and Leeds second-rower Adrian Morley won in 2002, the first of his three grand finals with the Roosters.
Howard says Graham is obviously relishing the role from the Dogs' bench.
"He can come on and do a lot of damage straight away and really lift the team," he says. "When I joined Wests in '97 I'd come from the Leeds Rhinos and was playing 70 to 80 minutes in the front-row every week. It was a really hard slog.
"But because of the unlimited interchanges I changed my whole physical structure and my cardiovascular system, and the way I played. I started doing 30 minutes work in 20, going 100 miles an hour.
"I remember Tommy Raudonikis saying to me 'listen son, just give me 15 tough minutes and then come off and then you can go back on again'.
"I said 'how many times can I go back on?' and he said 'as many as you want. Just get out there and bash 'em'."
