Rozzy, Coops and Bev: Easts’ Loss … and Australia’s Loss Too!

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Sport

With the new NRL season just around the corner, one of the strongest clubs will be, as ever, the Sydney Roosters, formerly before their rebranding, the Eastern Suburbs District Rugby League Club, one of the foundation clubs of the NSW Rugby League in 1908. This sporting history piece focuses on three of the club’s greatest wing three-quarters who all had atypical careers with Eastern Suburbs.

imageThe peculiar thread that connects these three is that their reputations as undeniably great players is based not on their respective careers with Eastern Suburbs, nor really on their performances at international level for their country, but on their prolonged, stellar careers in the English Rugby League (ERL) championship. They all began their first-class senior careers in League playing for Easts but circumstance, chance or opportunity, dictated that Easts (and Australia) were to be denied the full fruits of the greatness of their wing 3/4 play.

The first of the three Easts flankers of yesteryear, Albert Rosenfeld, played in the inaugural 1908 season in Australia, starring for Easts (alongside the pioneering League ‘immortal’ Dally Messenger). Rosenfeld played as a five-eighth, winning selection in the first ever Australian test against New Zealand. Although he initially wasn’t selected for the First Kangaroo squad to tour Britain at the end of the season (1908-09), after a public outcry he was added to the touring party. On the tour, Rosenfeld playing ‘stand-off’ (the English term for 5/8) against the powerful Great Britain team, caught the eye of several Northern Union (ERL) professional clubs. At the end of the Kangaroo tour Huddersfield secured the Easts star’s signature. Huddersfield turned the 166cm tall Australian 5/8 into a winger and the rest was British rugby league history.

AA Rosenfeld AA Rosenfeld

Playing for Huddersfield Rosenfeld rewrote the record books. In the 1911-12 season he scored 78 tries, a new record for the ERL. Two seasons later, he broke his own record with 80 tries in the season – which remains the all-time record in first-class rugby league, never matched! In 287 games with Huddersfield (in a career interrupted for three seasons by war service for Britain in the Great War) Rosenfeld scored a prolific 366 tries! As his career tapered off he played a couple of seasons with Wakefield Trinity and Bradford Northern.

After his professional commitment to Huddersfield and the Northern Union, ‘Rozzy’ Rosenfeld played only four more games for the Eastern Suburbs Tri-colours in the early part of the 1909 season (overall for Easts he played about a dozen games and scored just the 6 tries and kicked 12 goals). Similarly in his international career, Rosenfeld played only the four tests for Australia in 1908-09 and never again donned the blue and maroon❈ of the Kangaroos.

Rosenfeld married a local girl and stayed on in Huddersfield after his retirement from the game. When he died in 1970 he was the last surviving Kangaroo tourist from the 1908 pioneers. As well as his inclusion in both the British Rugby League Hall of Fame and the ‘100 Greatest Australian Players’ list, Rosenfeld, an Orthodox Jew, was accepted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

LW Cooper LW Cooper

Lionel Cooper, the second of the trio, emerged towards the end of WWII, originally coming from western NSW. Eastern Suburbs stalwart Ray Stehr spotted Cooper playing Australian Rules in Darwin during the war. After a handful of games for Easts he was selected for his state (6 tries in 4 games) and helped Easts win the 1945 Sydney premiership. He had a super year in 1946, representing Australia with distinction, 2 tries (80 to 90 yard efforts) in 3 tests against the powerful, touring Great Britain Lions and capping it off by being chosen as NSW Official Player of the Year.

In 1946-47 Cooper was lured to play professionally in England, and like Rosenfeld joined Huddersfield over bids from Leeds. In nine seasons and 333 games for the East Yorkshire club, the physically imposing, dynamic Cooper scored 420 tries on the wing or centre. A sensation in England, his achievements include 71 tries in the 1951-52 season and a all-time record 10 in one match against Keighley!

As with Rosenfeld before him, Cooper never played for Easts or Australia after signing up with an English club. His accomplishments in the ERL sponsored internationals, playing for Other Nationalities and the British Empire teams against Great Britain and New Zealand (17 tries in 17 matches), however give testimony to how great a loss to Australia the star winger was after completing just two seasons in Australia.

Gregory’s Guide to Rugby League (1965) described the West Wyalong born Cooper as “a bullocking, bruising winger … a great finisher of back-line movements … incorporating a hip-bumping technique to brush off defenders”. After he finished with Huddersfield Cooper returned to Australia but could not be enticed to play again in the NSWRFL and retired.

Brian Bevan is the most curious member of this trio of Australian wing exiles. Waverley born Bevan left Sydney rugby league and Australia precisely because he was not successful! A contemporary of Cooper’s, he was an Eastern Suburbs junior who unlike Cooper struggled to establish himself at the club. Bevan spent four years at Easts rarely able to get out of second grade. During this time he managed only eight games in the top grade and remarkably, given his later English triumphs, no tries.

BB BB

Bevan enlisted in the RAN during the war and his ship was sent to the UK for refitting. Whilst there, through the intermediary efforts of another former Easts’ winger in the UK (Bill Shankland), he approached first the Leeds Club, then Huntslet, for a trial. However he was summarily rebuffed by both clubs who thought the young Australian too frail-looking to survive in the rough and tough English competition.

Shankland advised Bevan to try Warrington. Whatever reservations they might have had about the frail Aussie winger, Warrington gave him a trial, playing him in a club reserves game. Impressed by his try-scoring performance, the South Lancashire club put him in the first XIII the next game and signed him up. In his first full season Bevan was an instant sensation, notching up 48 tries for the Wires (as Warrington rugby footballers are known), 14 to the better of any other player in the ERL comp that season.

Bevan continued the machine-like try-scoring exploits for the rest of his career with Warrington, consistency, sheer, relentless accumulation of three-pointers was his trademark feature. Five times he topped the championship try list, scoring a hat-trick (three tries) or more 98 times in his career (seven in a game twice!) With Bevan in its armoury Warrington was a very successful team in the period, both in terms of trophies won and in his crowd-pulling capacity for the club. Bevan in the starting lineup alone, could pull an extra 5,000 to a game (and not just home games) [‘Brian Eyrl Bevan: The greatest try scorer ever’, www.odeauk.fsnet.co.uk ].

In all Bevan scored 796 career tries (the nearest to him all-time, Wigan and GB great Billy Boston, is a distant 534 tries). For Warrington he scored a staggering 740 tries in 620 games (a shade under 1.2 tries per game!), plus 26 tries in 16 international games (Other Nationalities). His professional rugby career ended in 1964 after two seasons with lowly Blackpool Borough as player-coach.

imageWhat made this slightly-built, bald, toothless, chain-smoking winger such a phenomenon? Fellow Australian and ERL professional second rower Arthur Clues described him as “a skeleton in braces”, a physique looking totally out of place on a football field, but ‘Bev’ proved that looks can be deceiving. Firstly there was his sheer, blistering speed, he possessed an instant, rapid acceleration … he had been NSW sprint champion back home in Sydney. Allied to this amazing change of pace was a huge side-step off either foot without losing speed. The other weapon in Bevan’s attacking arsenal was his dazzling swerve, described as “a body wobble which totally debilitated (the opposition) … (Bevan was possessed seemingly of) swivel hips” [R Gate, The Great Bev: The Rugby League Career of Brian Bevan, F Keating, ‘Bald, toothless chainsmoker who staggered rugby league, The Guardian, 20 November 2000].

Another out-of-the-ordinary quality of Bevan’s was his ability to take intercepts, the “Wiz from Oz” possessed uncanny anticipation to grab passes intended for his opposite centre or wing and his extreme speed usually did the rest! Bevan’s physical appearance was certainly deceptive, slight of build but he was very wiry and undertook great preparations before a match, always spending an inordinate amount of time carefully and heavily bandaging his wonky-looking knees.

One additional factor distinguished Bevan from his peers and contributed vitally to his success. Bevan revolutionised the way wingers played the game. Before the Warrington “Wing Wiz” came along, wingers tended to stay fixed on the wing, running a line parallel to the sideline. Their positional role clearly defined as finishing off a backline movement, receiving the ball and making a hell-for-leather dash for the corner post. Bevan’s style was completely instinctual and unorthodox, he would often receive the ball and if well-marked on the flank he would suddenly pivot at right angles and make a characteristic diagonal run for the centre of the field to avoid defenders. The wandering wingman would often roam all over the field looking for an opening in the defence, and when he spotted one, he would turn on his incredible speed, usually leaving a bewildered trail of defenders in his wake. Warrington V Wigan (Ward Cup, 1948) typifies this, weaving from one side of the field to the other, beating over half the opposing team by himself and making them look complete fools in a zig-zagging 125 yard run to the tryline [Gate, loc.cit., Keating, loc.cit.].

image⇐(Not much of a likeness!)

Bevan was capable of tackling but he wasn’t much of a contributor in this area and far from the strongest defender in League for that matter. This didn’t overly concern the club chiefs at Wilderspool (the Wires’ headquarters). They correctly reasoned that the wing king was not there to wear himself out defending, but was in the team for the attacking edge it gave them, they were happy for him to keep producing those spectacular, often match-winning tries he was famous for. Recognition by his own country of the magnitude of Bevan’s English achievements was shown in his 2008 selection as one of the ‘100 Greatest Australian Players’.

Three Easts’ match-winning wingers, absolute legends of the game in Britain, but all lost to the club from Bondi, Sydney, that gave them their start … leaving Easts’ fans and Australian RL supporters generally to ponder what might have been.

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❈ the national rugby league colours for Australia prior to its change in the late 1920s to the now universally familiar “green and gold”)

Australian Football and Rugby League: Not always a Great Divide!

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Social History, Sport
Rugby: the great divide

A couple of years ago there was some talk in the media about the possibility of a rugby match between the Australian Rugby Union and the Australian Rugby League sides under composite rules [‘Kangaroos Vs Wallabies hybrid game: Why?’, The Roar, 25 October 2011]. In the end nothing came of the proposed code versus code match, but it did have echoes of the past in Australian sport. In 1909 an exhibition game of sorts between the two national rugby codes did take place as a “one-off” [‘The game begins’, League of Legends:100 Years of Rugby League in Australia, www.nma.gov.au/].

The best empirical example of hybridised football has probably been the fusion of Australian football (AFL) and Gaelic football. An all-Australian AFL side has played a Gaelic national side from the Republic of Ireland in a hybrid form of football (known as “International Rules” in Australia and “Compromise Rules” in Ireland) every year or every other year since 1984.

Rugby league test Aust v GB (Photo cr: Queensland State Library)

Back in the early days of rugby league in this country (from 1908), fairly concerted efforts were made by the Victorian Football League (VFL) and the NSW Rugby League (NSWRL) to arrive at a single, universal code of Australian football using elements of both professional games (Australian Rules and Rugby League). On two separate occasions, 1914 and again in 1933, the executives of both associations sat down together and tried to negotiate agreement on a universal code of football. How serious the codes were about this goal, and whether the realisation of a single, composite set of rules would have led to an actual merger of the two codes, remains a moot but ultimately unanswerable point.

In 1914 the initiative for a merger appeared to come from the VFL. Elements within the VFL (with some support from the South Australian and West Australian Leagues) led by Charles Brownlow, Geelong Club secretary and delegate to the Australian National Football Council (ANFC), viewed the 1914 All-State National Rules Carnival in Sydney as much of a failure. Interest in the carnival and in Australian football in general was down compared to that in the fledgling sport of rugby league, which was drawing big crowds (especially the Australia-Great Britain tests of that year). A point not lost on the VFL – the 1914 Melbourne Grand Final drew only 30,000 spectators compared to crowds of up to 41,000 for rugby league test matches during the same season! Brownlow (later memorialised eponymously in the Brownlow Medal) was of the opinion that a new combined sport of rugby league and Australian rules could produce a better spectacle, which would add thousands of pounds to the gate takings for games. The NSW Rugby League’s long-time secretary, Horrie Miller, was also favourable to the idea of a merger [‘The Australian and Rugby League Game Combine?’, NSW Football History Society (July 2014), www.nswfootballhistory.com.au].

(Photo cr: The Mercury (Tas.))

A series of conferences were held during 1914 where the representatives of VFL clubs, the other equivalent, state football bodies and the rugby league authorities, discussed the various pros and cons of such an amalgamation. The Australian Press conducted a running commentary on the universal code proposal, with some commentators wholeheartedly talking up its merits, eg, WH John in The Winner. John’s article in the Melbourne paper, ‘Universal Code further examined: Success predicted in Australia’ (9 December 1914), argued that 18 players-a-side in “Australian Rules” was too many and the field was too large! The Registrar (Adelaide) suggested that a fusion of the two codes would demonstrate the best of the “British race”, quoting outgoing NSWRL Secretary Ted Larkins’ view that the hybrid game would embody the “characteristics of Britishers” (a notion which seems to echo the then popularly accepted belief in the validity of eugenics) [The Registrar (25 May 1914)].

Other newspaper commentators were less sanguine about the chances of merging the two codes. JC Davis writing under the apt pseudonym, “The Cynic”, opined that the status quo would not change, because the love of the game of Aussie rules in Victoria and of rugby league in Sydney was too deeply-ingrained in each code’s grass-roots supporters to allow them to accept the proposed alterations to their own game [‘The Universal Football Code’, The Referee (Sydney), 14 October 1914].

Another factor in the dynamic, as Martin Sharp has observed, was that Sydneysiders, even prior to the advent of rugby league in 1908, were reluctant to embrace Australian football due to the perception that “Victorian Rules (was) a Melbourne invention” [M Sharp, ‘Australian Football in Sydney Before 1914’, Sporting Traditions, Vol 4, No 1 (November 1987)]. This point is endorsed by Matthew Healy who noted that Sydney was a rugby (union) stronghold from 1880 to 1914, with the Victorian football establishment making little inroad in promoting the ‘southern’ code up north during this period [M Healy, ‘Hard Sell: Australian Football in Sydney’, unpublished MA thesis, Victoria University (Melb.), 2002]. The era of the Sydney Swans was still far into the future in those says.

It wasn’t from any lack of trying! The VFL certainly made a wholehearted effort to create a foothold for Australian football in the harbour city. The Vics had a good local advocate for its game in NSW politician Edward O’Sullivan who declared that NSW should “support a game that was invented by Australians for Australia”. The VFL invested money into promoting the code in Sydney via visiting school ‘lecturers’, but by the early 1910s rugby league was easily pulling the biggest crowds in Sydney [Sean Fagan, ‘Aussie Rules almost had Sydney’; ‘The Superiority of the Melbourne Game’, Australian Rugby History, www.saintsandheathens.wordpress.com]. The Sydney Football League competition launched in 1903 remained a minnow in Sydney when compared to either rugby code.

At the conferences on amalgamation Brownlow and Miller’s proposals to combine the codes met with a mixture of vocal and determined opposition from individual VFL club delegates (especially Carlton) and indifference. Despite the NSWRL and the SANFL in February 1915 agreeing to amalgamate, no decision was reached at the conferences involving Victoria, Tasmania, West Australia, Queensland and NSW. With the nation becoming more preoccupied with its involvement as part of the British Empire in the Great War, the issue of amalgamation soon ran out of steam [op.cit. ‘Australian and Rugby League Game Combine?’].

In 1933 elements within the Australian football and rugby fraternity reignited the cause of a single, universal code of football. Again, the catalyst seems to have been that year’s 10-day interstate carnival in Sydney. Consequently, a conference was held in August, bringing together the state delegates of the ANFC and the delegates of the NSWRL (significantly the discussions were boycotted by the Queensland Rugby League). Supporters of an Australian football/rugby league fusion (including once again the NSWRL Secretary HR Miller) held the view that the future of football would be assured by adopting one code which combined the best features of both games [‘One Code of Football’, Daily Advertiser (Wagga Wagga), 28 July 1933].

(Photo cr: www.australianfootball.com)

This time the proponents of code amalgamation approached the issue in a more systematic manner. HR Miller drafted a specific set of rules for the new code which included 15 players-a-side (splitting the difference in numbers between AF and RL), an oval field but reduced in size, abolition of the scrum and replacing it with a bounce, limited off-side would be allowed, behind posts replaced by a H-shaped rugby goalpost, and the scoring of both tries and goals permitted. In talks Miller pitched the new rules’ appeal to the Australian football leagues in terms of making it more of an open, action-plus game, “We are giving what you Australian rule (sic) people are asking for and what the Australian public require – that is action … at no stage of the game would the ball be dead.” [‘Amalgamation of Games – Second Time Round’, NSW Football History (July 2014); Sydney Morning Herald, 27 July 1933; ‘Rugby League Proposed Unification in 1933: The game they never played’ www.footystats.freeservers.com].

NSW v Qld 1949 interstate game (Photo: nswrl.com.au)

On the basis of Miller’s “compromise rules” a clandestine match was played at the RAS Sydney Showground at Moore Park with the players drawn from the Queensland Football League supplemented by some local rugby league players. The game was somewhat of a shambles – it was supposed to be 14-a-side contest but there was not enough numbers available, none of the participants were familiarised with the new rules, the Queensland AF players had just completed a hard game against the Canberra AF side the previous day – and so did not advance the cause of the composite code game! [op.cit. (‘Amalgamation of Games’)].

The proposals put to the ANFC by Miller on behalf of the NSWRL were taken back by the state delegates to their leagues for consideration. The football leagues ultimately however did not consider themselves bound by the ANFC’s recommendation. In the end the respective authorities of each code were not prepared to compromise by making concessions to any meaningful degree in the alteration of their game (the off-side rule remained a particular “bone of contention” to the negotiators[ibid.].

(Photo cr: www.rugby-league.com)

As a consequence, the case for amendment leading to a universal code of football floundered. The NSWRL committee subsequently voted 15 to 10 against further consideration of a fusion with Australian football [‘Football Merger: Rugby League not to Pursue – Not Impressed by Conference’, Canberra Times (ACT), 15 August 1933; ‘Football Merger left in Air – No decision for renewal of Conference’, Canberra Times, 12 August 1933]. Thus, all discussion of a hybridised AFL/RL football code was quietly dropped … this time for good!

The Victorian football and code of choice