Vale Andrew Johns

Ok, so it is definitely not the done thing to even acknowledge the existence of Rugby League in an AFL related blog. But until this quest is over, i remain a paid up member of one team only and that’s the Newcastle Knights.*

Due to a neck injury, Andrew Johns has announced his retirement, effective immediately from the game.

If you don’t know anything about Rugby League, the closest thing i can imagine in AFL to Johns is what Gary Ablett must have experienced in Geelong in his heyday. If Ablett is God in Geelong, Johns is the entire Holy trinity in Newcastle and gets all the same scrutiny and then some. Without question he is one of the truly great players ever to play the game and he has been the focus of the hopes, fears, aspirations, prejudices and dreams of most of the population of Newcastle for over a decade. On the field, at his best he was without par. Almost perfect. Off the field he was imperfect, but given the scrutiny, the rumours, the temptations, the accolades and the standards set by Gary Ablett it would be unfair to say he was particularly imperfect.

I have met Andrew Johns once and once only. It was the Thursday after Newcastle had an extraordinary win in the 1997 ARL Grand Final – their first premiership. That game was one of the greatest games ever played. With BHP about to close in a city with double digit unemployment, the poorest club taking on the richest, the working class versus the silver tails, and with Newcastle’s players having rejected Murdoch’s Super League raid, it was a game loaded with all the symbolism you could ever invest in a sporting event. Johns had famously played the game against medical advice after being released from hospital days before with a punctured lung. In no small part due to Johns, Newcastle had triumphed in the last seconds.

Why am i doing this?

Ok, A few people have asked me how can i not have a team already?

Well, I’m originally from Newcastle. If there is a place in Australia where there is less interest in AFL footy I’d be pretty shocked to find it. Rugby League is in the blood up there and they certainly don’t have an AFL team. My mother introduced my brother and I to league from when we were born and she’d been dragged along to local games by her father from when she was three foot tall. At primary school in the 80s we had no idea who the Bombers or the Lions were but we argued a lot about complicated questions of whether a Sea Eagle would whip an Eel or vice versa…

[From memory the answer depended a lot on whether it was an electric Eel or not and whether you thought that was implied by the Parramatta logo).]

As for Aussie Rules where i grew up, i think they maybe showed the Grand Final each year and they used to talk about it a bit on Hey Hey it’s Saturday. The only other thing i ever heard about it were rumours that the local NBN TV newsreader Ray Dinneen (apparently a Collingwood fan) dabbled in a bit of “aerial ping pong” on the weekends. I’m not saying that was a bad thing but you could not have slandered the man more by straight out claiming he was wearing frilly lingerie below the news desk. Ray’s honour needed to be salvaged by someone adding the “but he’s still a top bloke” qualifier whenever it was mentioned.