Shall we lower it just for wayne? How about winning the srcum stats in the Charity shield?
To be better than someone who won three in a row, you have to win 4 in a row. Simple.
The salary cap helped Bennet at Brisbane in 3 ways. First, they were the only club that didn't have to include reserve grade in the cap. Second, lower cost of living in Brisbane compared to Sydney was a key bargaining point then - as in Dale Shearer telling Manly officials that he couldn't afford to live there. And Third, lots of third party payments - dressed up as players business investments.
In fact, if you wanna compare premierships, Gibson went back to back against the test pack in 82/83. From memory, Saints pack a decade later had 3 internationals, and none from the backs?
I haven't checked, but neither Easts or Parra under Gibson regularly had 11 test/origin players. I do recall that many in the media laughed at the pack Gibson amassed at Parra in 1981. I do recall Greg Hartley and Peter Peters saying that if Parra won the comp with Bob O'Reilly and Kevin Stevens in the pack they would walk from Wollongong to Newcastle in thongs.
QUOTE]
Agreed. From the inception of the Broncos, Bennett has had a SOO team at his disposal. Jack took on the challenges of lesser teams. Everyone talks about Bennett wanting to coach teams which have the cattle to get him another GF. I don't know what Jack was thinking of when he went to Souths in 1978. Either they threw a heap of cash (which i doubt they had since they nearly went broke in the seventies hence the Save Our Souths campaign) at him or he decided to do something in the interest of the game and help out a struggling club.
In 75 Souths took the spoon and in 1977 Souths had a 3-19 record to finish above Newtown 2-20 in the cripple fight race for the spoon. They were dark days for Souths. In 78 Jack took Souths to within 3 points of the 5, a great achievement given the lack of talent (and money) he had to work with and from then on Souths were competitive till the 90s.