The memory lingers - Paul McLean's Garryowen
It can be funny how observations made during a lifetime can sit with you long after far more essential things have been emptied from the cache in the brain.
Coming across a book purchased some years back but left too long unread, it opened one of those railway carriages, an analogy a former biology teacher liked to apply to how the memory side of the brain worked. Images of rugby skills belonging to Australia and Queensland's first five-eighths Paul McLean poured out of that carriage.
The book was titled
Paul McLean, written by Malcolm McGregor and published in 1986.
McLean was always an interesting character. His family background in rugby was fascinating and comparable with the Hadlees in New Zealand cricket.
He was a product of Queensland, a region where rugby has only sometimes been the most prominent choice of oval ball fans. He knew that well, having played rugby league throughout his developmental years.
But when he came to appreciate there might be a significant career in rugby while attending university, studying might be too wishful a choice; he very quickly became part of one of the significant tectonic shifts in world rugby – the development of Queensland as a powerhouse in the game.
It's worth remembering that there have been long stints in the Australian game where Queensland didn't feature. The game was moribund, and games played by the All Blacks against 'Australia' were only games against New South Wales and not always regarded as Test matches as a consequence by New Zealand administrators.
And in the early-1970s, Queensland, and Australia, were emerging from a specific era of decay so bad that a national plan to lift the game was undertaken and from which players like McLean and his Queensland side emerged to give Australia genuine strength on the world stage.
The quality wasn't as enduring as that from the mid-to-late-1980s, but it was a start and some memorable play developed during that first period.
Queensland regularly started to hammer their southern rivals. They also had far more regular contact with New Zealand provincial sides. Much of that resulted from the man whose agony it was to coach the Australian touring team of 1972, who were unfortunately so unsuccessful that they became known as the 'woeful Wallabies'.
That man, Bob Templeton, loved the game and saw its value well enough not to be put off. He went home and nurtured the great Queensland side of the late-1970s, and he had as one of his vital admirals Paul McLean. Others shone, Mark Loane, the great No.8; Tony Shaw, who led the side to New Zealand in 1978; Jeff Miller, the livewire flanker; and Greg Cornelson, who scored four tries in a Test at Eden Park for Australia in 1978, fullback Roger Gould, wings Paddy Batch, Brendan Moon and Peter Grigg, centres Andrew Slack and Michael O'Connor. The list goes on.
All of this is well captured in McGregor's book, which highlighted what an outstanding period it was and how tough it must have been to play through an era in which parochial, and it was not much more than that, bias existed, especially in the Sydney media of the time.
It was a bias that saw McLean continually fighting off the skills of southern men buoyed by some boosterisms of those in the south who believed the Queensland man could not play 'the running game' so beloved in Sydney. As McGregor pointed out many times, the critics failed to examine how many tries those outside McLean scored.
That's an issue All Black Grant Fox would relate to.
But McLean persevered and got to make his contribution to his era, ending with 1000 points scored for Queensland, achieving the feat in his 100th game, while also playing 31 Tests and scoring 263 points, at the time the most by an Australian.
From a personal perspective, and having witnessed his control from the fabulous eerie that was the press box in the roof of the old grandstand at Rugby Park in Invercargill, for Australia against Southland in 1978, it was his application of the corkscrew up and under into the opposition's goalmouth that has lingered longest.
It was a remarkable, yet beautiful, kick. It was high; it swirled around, then dropped as if weighted while tending to swing away from potential catchers like a fast bowler's outswinger. It put the men underneath waiting to catch it under terrible pressure, especially when forwards like Shaw, Cornelson, locks Garrick Fay, and Peter McLean were bearing down on you.
The Irish called it a 'Garryowen', named after the club that made the tactic into an art form in the 1920s.
It was something that few others were quite so able to employ, and it was so effective that it is remarkable that it has all but disappeared from the game.
Sure, there are dinky cross-kicks, clever chip kicks and the manufactured 50-22s, but none of them contains the sheer horror, for the receiver at least, that McLean's kick in such a crucial area of the field could achieve.
It took remarkable men to deal with the kick, and Southland was fortunate in fielding two of them that day. One, wing Ian Donaldson, also played cricket for Southland, so he knew more than most about dealing with a swirling catch; the other, fullback Jeff Gardiner was one of the more assured fielders of high balls on the provincial scene. They dropped none, and Southland won 10-7.
But the memory lingers, and Paul McLean's story is a timely reminder of a fascinating era, pre-professional, in the game. There may be aspects of hagiography in defending McLean, but the story highlights a unique era in the Australian, and Queensland, games.
It is also a reminder of what can be achieved when plans are put in place, and adhered to, to produce a wholesale change in performance and achievement.