I loathe them because filthy lucre is no cure for moral bankruptcy
Roy Masters | October 4, 2008
MANLY are money. The Sea Eagles should be sponsored by the Mint. All through their history, cash has been their greatest weapon. Rugby league has a socialist history but Manly have a capitalist heart.
The code's early attempts to achieve parity - residential qualifications, 13-import rule, ceiling payments - were quickly flouted by the Silvertails in their quest for premierships. They raided Souths for their first flag, seizing prop John O'Neill and centre Ray Branighan, then swept on North Sydney, buying John Gray and Bruce Walker for the controversial 1978 trophy, and then attempted to rip out Wests' heart by signing Les Boyd, John Dorahy and Ray Brown. In recent times, they sought to do the same to Melbourne, buying half Matt Orford and centre Steve Bell.
Their strategy has always been twofold - buy the best players from a top-four club, undermining their chances while enhancing their own.
The Silvers even bought North Sydney players in the early 1970s, such as the effervescent Pommy halfback Graham Williams, and housed them in reserve grade in order to keep the Bears down. And now they have all of coastal Sydney north of the Harbour Bridge to themselves.
North Sydney survived for a couple of years as officially one half of the Northern Eagles, the shotgun marriage of Norths and the Sea Eagles arranged at the end of the Super League war. The marriage merely gave the Sea Eagles time to regroup and force out the Bears via a clause that declared the NRL licence would revert to Manly if the joint venture failed.
It collapsed through weight of debt, even though the North Sydney coaching package of Graham Murray and Michael Hagan cost less than Manly's candidate, Peter Sharp.
In August, 2001, when Manly needed a $1 million cheque to lodge their licence with the NRL, they turned to property developer Phil Franks.
And when they needed a half owner of the football club, they turned to a richer property developer, Max Delmege. He has subsequently bought the Leagues Club and will no doubt convert it into office space for use by merchant bankers, mortgage brokers and dealers in the short-term money market.
Last Friday, A-League team the Central Coast Mariners, secured the marketing rights to the Gosford stadium from John Singleton. This effectively ends any hope of an NRL team relocating to the NSW Central Coast. Can you imagine the rents the FFA would charge an NRL team to base itself in Gosford? So now Manly have all the territory from the Sydney Harbour Bridge to Newcastle to themselves.
The Sea Eagles have been on an expansionist course since Captain Arthur Phillip sailed into Sydney Harbour. He described a tribe of Aborigines he sighted on the northern side of the harbour as "manly", in the sense they had a very masculine, noble bearing.
NSW's first governor was unaware why the tribe was so well nourished. In the dead of night, they would paddle their bark canoes south to Botany Bay, seizing yams from the decent tribes around La Perouse and oysters from the Georges River, taking food from the mouths of inhabitants of settlements that later became South Sydney and St George. Captain Phillip should have termed the tribe he sighted "the Poachers".
They're still at it. Forwards Glenn Hall and Brent Kite were taken from Souths and St George Illawarra respectively.
Today, Manly is merely a name the Silvertails think they are. Their emblem, a sea eagle, is well chosen. Talons and talent. On a recent visit to the Adelaide River, I witnessed a sea eagle swoop down and snatch a chunk of meat from the jaws of a crocodile. Ken "Arko" Arthurson, Manly's long-term supremo, managed this feat a thousand times, signing players from under the nose of Canterbury's Peter "Bullfrog" Moore.
Manly's colours of maroon and white are close to the decor of a jewellery store, reflected in the bling of the celebrity cult of women who support them, such as Sarah O'Hare, wife of one of Australia's richest men, Lachlan Murdoch. OK, their patron Kerry Sibraa is a very loyal, decent man, a past president of the Senate and formerly our man in Harare. In fact, things did not go bad in Zimbabwe until after he left. But the politician most closely associated with Manly is the former premier of NSW, Sir Robert Akin, he of the $20,000 knighthoods.
Manly people understand the price mechanism better than anyone. University students living in Harbord have posters of Gorden Gekko in their bedrooms, never Che Guevara.
They trace the beginning of the worldwide subprime mortgage crisis to the uppity people of Sydney's western suburbs seeking to upgrade their houses from fibro to weatherboard. Greed is only good if you live on the north side.
If you link Manly premierships with movements in the share index, you'll actually discover the Sea Eagles caused the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression. In 1987, Manly won the last grand final played at the SCG, and what happened a month later? The New York Stock Exchange recorded its biggest one-day fall! And now, with the Dow down, Manly's on-field hopes are high again.
But how do you loathe a club with a bow-legged coach who was raised in Penrith? Des Hasler's nickname is "Sorry", an indication of his apologetic nature.
The Silvers have drifted a long way from the "manly" people Phillip first described but should they win tomorrow, we can't deny it will be "Sorry's Day".
http://www.leaguehq.com.au/news/new...nkruptcy/2008/10/03/1223013790929.html?page=2
Are we getting soft groggito :lol: your wife, my bro-in-law, would love them to feel what we did this year....just not at our expense ;-)
