‘I’ll always be a Tigers player’: How season at Leichhardt set Grant on path to grand final
By Christian Nicolussi
October 5, 2024 — 4.45pm
Grand final week is always a time for players to reflect on the journey that helped get them to the biggest game of the year.
For Harry Grant, he will forever be grateful for his year at the Wests Tigers when part of a Melbourne swap deal with Paul Momirovski.
“I’ll always be a Wests Tigers player, which is pretty cool,” Grant told this masthead.
“I embraced being there. I was all in that season and what we could achieve.
“I learnt a lot about what it took to play first grade, week in and week out.
“It set me up to be in a good position when I did come back to the Melbourne Storm.”
Grant was in the Storm system but stranded behind gun starting hooker and captain Cameron Smith, while Brandon Smith was the back-up dummy half.
Believing Smith was about to retire at the end of 2020, Grant knew he needed to be playing regular football if he was any chance to beat Brandon Smith to the coveted No.9 jersey.
Storm coach Craig Bellamy recalled it being his idea. Then Tigers coach Michael Maguire said the swap deal was floated by his offsider Scott Woodward.
Grant was prepared to head to the other side of the world for 12 months, but was glad when the Tigers came knocking.
“It was my dad [Paul] who spoke about going to Super League for a year to change things up and learn a different style of footy,” Grant said this week.
“I went to Craig [Bellamy] with the idea, but he spoke about going to another NRL club.
“I was lucky I didn’t go to England because it was the COVID year. If I was there, I wouldn’t have played many games at all that season.
“It was a great adventure for me going to the Tigers. I got a lot of exposure and experience, and met some really cool people.
“When you have an opportunity to play NRL, you have to take it, and that’s what 2020 was for me.
“It hadn’t been done before, but I’d encourage other people to take that option up moving forward [if possible].
“I played 15 games that year and was picked for Origin. I was in Origin camp [in Queensland] when the Storm played in the grand final.”
Maguire loved Grant’s appetite for work and application to training, and will never forget the Leichhardt locals chanting his name when he came to the sideline for a well-earned spell one night.
“I’ll never forget the crowd chanting, ‘Harry, Harry’, because they appreciated all the effort he had put in from the time he got to the club,” Maguire said.
“He’s a great player. He works really hard at his game. He’s also very smart. What he is achieving now, he deserves everything because of the hard work he puts in.
“It was Scott Woodward who put the idea to me. We put it to the people down there [Melbourne], they liked the idea, and away we went.”
Bellamy has said on many occasions he never thought he would unearth a classy No.9 as quickly as he did following Smith’s exit.
The supercoach said Grant was always in the club’s long-term plans, and the move to the Tigers was never going to be for longer than 12 months.
“The idea was to give him some experience in first grade,” Bellamy said. “We knew how good a player he was, we knew Cameron was retiring, so it was a win-win for us, a win-win for Harry and a win-win for the Tigers.
“I think it was my idea. We said, ‘You go and play first grade because it will give you a better chance of doing the job better when you come back’. He agreed with that. It was a little bit of a selfish thing for us because we wanted him more than ready by the time Cameron retired. A year in the NRL helped that happen.”
Grant was elevated to captain this year, has arguably become the best hooker in the NRL, and said his last premiership dated back to his junior days with the Yeppoon Seagulls, just south of Rockhampton in Queensland.
Harry Grant’s loan spell with Wests Tigers in 2020 was revolutionary at the time. But it has paid of handsomely for the Storm.
www.smh.com.au
