Souths fans celebrate their grand final victory: ‘the notion of South Sydney as a successful club will now become a regular piece of the NRL’s conceptual furniture’.Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images
All week we were told this would be the greatest grand final of all time. In the two days since, the verdict has been unanimous: it was the greatest grand final of all time. It was there in the tears of elation that followed the final whistle. It was there in the scenes on Monday down at Redfern Oval. It was there in the scoreline, it was there in the swelling over Sam Burgess’s right eye, then there again in the swelling over his left eye, as emotion won out and the 2014 NRL season got what it had always been –ha – crying out for: a half-decent weeping footballer meme. Everything about this match made it clear: this was the greatest grand final of all time, a grand final so manifestly worthy of that title – grand – that it belonged in a category all its own, away from the other, less good grand finals, which, while good and perhaps even great, were of a goodness and greatness operating on an infinitely lower plane than this one. Then there was Crowie. Crowie! With hair like Moe from the Three Stooges and a jacket fit for the isolation ward of an Ebola-wracked hospital in West Africa, Crowie strode onto the field after the full-time whistle and immediately set about the important business of cupping the faces of grown men, staring into their eyes and saying how much he loved them. This, here, was definitive proof that we were living through the greatest grand final ever. Then there was Madge. Madge! Among public figures in this country, probably only Glenn Stevens comes close to matching Michael Maguire’s absurdly high ratio of words spoken to lip movements made. The man could make it through a whole day of verbal communication without once shifting his mouth out of Clint Eastwood mode. But here he was, on full time, cavorting across the field with a big smile on his face – and when his jubilant players observed NRL tradition by dunking him with the traditional esky of chilled blue crap, he opened his mouth wider than it’s ever been opened before – further evidence, you won’t be surprised to hear, that this was the greatest grand final of all time.
Then there was George Piggins. Piggo! Then there was Andrew Denton. Dento! All of them there, and all of them demonstrating, by their very presence, that South Sydney v Canterbury-Bankstown, 5 October 2014, was the greatest grand final in rugby league history.
I’m exaggerating here, of course; I’m making a point, you might say, for rhetorical effect. There’s little doubt that events on the field at Homebush, coupled with the emotion surrounding the return of the premiership to Redfern after 43 years of bitter separation, vindicate the exuberance at work in many of the reactions to the grand final – this grand final, thatgrand final, the best of the best – since Sunday. Watching George Burgess carry four defenders over the line for that gathering, barging, beautiful breakthrough try, or Greg Inglis, ball tucked into his left wrist, cut through 80 metres of Bulldogs defence, it wasn’t hard to convince yourself that some higher force was at work in events on the field, a thesis only strengthened by the delirious luck of the bounce for two of the Rabbitohs’ tries.
For one day, it’s true – we were all Rabbitohs. But what are we now? There’s been something profoundly irritating about the way the game, in the first draft of history put together since Sunday, has been automatically invested with an aura of tectonic, for-the-ages significance. And that is a great thing that we can feel so legitimately irritated, because it means, above all, that South Sydney is finally a normal NRL team once more.
The last 15 years in the NRL, since the competition came back together after the agonies of the Super League Wars, have been all about healing the fissures of the past, and reconnecting the sport to its own heritage. After the Dragons ended their three-decade dry spell in 2010 and the Tigers atoned for the heartaches of the late 1980s by flick-passing and fending their way to glory in 2005, getting the Provan-Summons trophy back to Redfern was the last great historical club project left for the NRL to accomplish.
Today there are no projects of that nature left. Eels fans might disagree, of course, but 1986 still feels so close; the rat-a-tat shuttle of the ball across that golden Eels back line, through Sterling and Kenny and all the way out to Eric Grothe, is a vision that still seems densely present in our everyday notion of the game (as opposed to, say, Souths’ triumph in 1971 or the Dragons’ achievements of the 1960s, which have an archival, pre-colour TV quality to them).
With Souths’ premiership arguably representing the last stage in the decade-and-a-half long reconciliation of the game with itself, it’s not entirely clear where the NRL goes from here. While the salary cap has kept the game blissfully, magnificently even, a lucky fate not shared by many other professional football leagues throughout the world, the question of how rugby league in this country grows – an imperative for any sport seeking to avoid stagnation – lingers. Does the league expand? If it does, how does it do so in a way that avoids the mistakes of the 1990s? What does the NRL do to repel the encroachment of the other codes, especially the AFL, on its home territory? These are not easy questions to answer, and it’s not entirely clear whether anyone in NRL HQ has given them significant thought. The Rabbitohs – and some junior family members – celebrate victory. Photograph: Mark Kolbe/Getty Images
In the meantime, we must endure the gloating of the rejuvenated Redfern faithful. And how quickly that gloating is starting to grate. Even the mythology of Souths is already starting to feel a little tiresome, with all the talk of the club being the Pride of the League and the fetishisation of Sam Burgess’s cheekbone fracture. From Sattler to Burgess, never has a club so relentlessly glorified its own players’ facial imperfections. No doubt there’s a touch of one-upmanship involved in the club’s liturgical recitation of the Miracle of Sam Burgess’s Cheek, as if the presence of real pain and real heroism on the field makes this grand final victory – their grand final victory – somehow sweeter, or nobler, or more magnificent than any grand final that has ever come before. “Sure, Roosters, Storm, Sea Eagles, Dragons, Broncos, Tigers, Bulldogs, Panthers, and Knights,” the Rabbitohs seem to be saying to their rivals, “you might have won premierships over the last 15 years too – but your star players never played the full 80 with a smashed-up face. You will never match our pain.” The Book of Feuds, which Russell Crowe commissioned shortly after taking over the club in 2006 and which documents the history of the Rabbitohs’ rivalries, was always a stunt, a palliative designed to offer a benign, playful outlet to the grievances associated with eviction from the NRL in 1999 and the George Piggins era at the club; it was rage made into theatre. But victory on Sunday means the Book is now definitively closed, and with it, the Rabbitohs have returned to being what they were always meant to be: a club like any other, with routine rivalries and changing fortunes like any other.
The notion of South Sydney as a successful club will now become a regular piece of the NRL’s conceptual furniture, a part of the sport as ordinary and dependable as NSW losing the second Origin game or Ray Warren’s pronunciation of the word “Watmough”. For the last 15 years, pretty much from the moment they were booted from the competition, Souths’ fans and administrators have wanted two things: vindication, and a premiership. Now they have them both. The animating rage has been quelled and the affections of the neutrals, inevitably, will dissipate: supporting the Bunnies will no longer be the automatically just and right thing for anyone who cares about the game and its heritage to do.
The Rabbitohs now embark on a different path: the path of normalcy. How they fare will be fascinating to watch, and what’s most pleasing about this grand final – more pleasing, for instance, than the notion of a completed circle of history, or the righting of past wrongs – is that it liberates the rest of us from the need to feel sorry for Souths. And it frees the sport, more generally, from the limiting, fundamentally retrospective forces of pity, nostalgia and redress; it allows rugby league to think – more carefully, less emotionally – about its future.
After 43 years, it’s finally OK to start hating South Sydney again. And that is precisely as things should be.
Souths fans celebrate their grand final victory: ‘the notion of South Sydney as a successful club will now become a regular piece of the NRL’s conceptual furniture’.Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images
The Rabbitohs – and some junior family members – celebrate victory. Photograph: Mark Kolbe/Getty Images
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