Brian Smith was entering his second season as coach of the Newcastle Knights when he found himself at the local pub enjoying a quiet black ale with, funnily enough, former captain Andrew Johns.
Johns, who had been forced into retirement during the 2007 season because of a serious neck injury, was in a reflective mood.
“How many comps do you think we should have won?” Johns asked.
“More than two,” Smith said.
“I reckon we should have won five,” Johns replied.
Smith is telling me this story because I’ve asked him the question Johns did not: how many premierships should you have won, Brian? How many should Parramatta have claimed in your 10 seasons in charge? When the Eels were in the sweetest of spots with their premiership window wide open?
Former Parramatta coach Brian Smith.Credit:Getty
“I don’t define success in terms of premierships,” Smith says. “But it’s a burden I had to carry then — and it’s the burden I carry now. After three or four years of being out of coaching, I felt it more. I was always too busy when I was coaching to think about it. There was always another opportunity somewhere else. When I finished, I realised, ‘It’s never gonna happen lad’.”
The problem with storied history is you’re constantly trying to live up to it. The golden years haunt football teams and this week, as the Eels prepare for the grand final against Penrith on Sunday night, the ghosts are out and about.
There’s the ghost of the 1998 preliminary final loss against Canterbury in extra-time. The ghost of 2001 when the Eels broke try and point-scoring records throughout the season, only to be humbled by Johns and the Knights in the decider. There’s the ghost of 2005 when they finished minor premiers, only to get thumped in the prelim against the Cowboys. And there’s the ghost of 2009 when the Storm did what nobody else could do that season by closing down Jarryd Hayne, admittedly with a team millions over the salary cap.
“Always happy to talk about the hoodoo,” former captain Tim Mannah chuckles when you dial his number. “My favourite topic.”
Brian Smith consoles his Eels players after their loss to Newcastle in the 2001 grand final.Credit:Steve Christo
After being introduced to the NSWRL premiership in 1947, it took the Eels 30 years to reach a grand final. When they eventually won their first title in 1981, coach Jack Gibson had to tell captain Steve Edge which way to run the lap of honour. By the time retiring icons Mick Cronin and Ray Price were accepting a chunky statue called the Winfield Cup from prime minister Bob Hawke in 1986, Parramatta had notched four premierships.
Few thought the good times would ever end. But they do and it’s been 36 years of generational trauma ever since, making them the last Sydney powerhouse that needs to snap a long-standing premiership drought.
Some argue joint ventures are entirely new entities but try telling that to their fans. The Wests Tigers’ premiership in 2005 was Balmain’s first since 1969 and Wests’ first since 1952. When St George Illawarra won in 2010, it buried the pain of five grand final losses since St George’s last premiership in 1979. The banner belonging to one fan that night perfectly captured the moment: “CHOKE ON THAT”.
In 2014, South Sydney broke their 43-year hiatus. Two years later, the Sharks put an end to the Harold Holt jokes when they won their first grand final in their 50th season.
Eels coach Brad Arthur and his players have remained on message this week, claiming the lack of premiership success doesn’t weigh on them.
“All paper talk, man,” says Eric Grothe jnr, who played in the 2009 grand final and whose father played in those four premierships from the 1980s. “Nobody’s going to training saying, ‘Oh, it’s been 36 years’. It’s not like that. That sort of chat’s for the pub. Sorry to dull down your story.”
Mannah says the lack of silverware during his time at the Eels, from 2009 to 2019, doesn’t affect him as much as others.
“I thought not winning a comp would stay with me for the rest of my life,” Mannah says. “But it hasn’t weighed me down. It’s had a bigger impact on Hindy — he lost two grand finals. He always talks about how we let him down.”
Nathan Hindmarsh is haunted because he played more matches for the Eels than any other player: 330 matches from 1998 to 2012. He played in the devastating matches in 1998, 2001 and 2009 but missed the 2005 preliminary with a knee injury.
Brian Smith leading a training session with Eels players, including Nathan Hindmarsh (right), in 2006.Credit:Fairfax
“There will always be a piece of me that will never be satisfied,” Hindmarsh says.
Those close to him report that he never watches the final five minutes of the grand final in any code because he struggles to watch championship-winning teams celebrate.
Hindmarsh has worn plenty of jokes about his grand final record but the true poster boy of Eels misery is Paul Carige, who is still the subject of endless memes and cruel social media jibes for his performance in the grand final qualifier of 1998.
“There’s some epic stories to be told about that match,” Smith says. “Someone should write a book on that. There’s some painful episodes there.”
The Eels led 18-2 with 10 minutes to play. They were eyeing a grand final against the Broncos, who they had beaten in the major semi-final a fortnight before.
After the Eels leaked three quick tries, and then watched a pair of miracle sideline conversions from Daryl Halligan, Carige came up with a series of inexcusable errors as the clock wound down and Smith’s eyes rolled back into his head.
In the last minute, at 18-all, he handed back possession twice, the second time from a kick on the first tackle of the set that allowed Bulldogs halfback Craig Polla-Mounter to launch one last field goal attempt that shaved the underside of the black dot. In extra time, he caught a ball and went over the sideline on his own try line.
“He’s made some of the dumbest plays I’ve ever seen in a game of rugby league,” former Eels halfback Peter Sterling said in commentary for Nine.
Then he did it a second time. Canterbury ran over Parramatta 32-20.
“I wish the coach had pulled me off,” Carige told the Parra Cave podcast in 2020. “We might have won.” Told that Eels fans don’t blame him for the loss, Carige replied: “Fans are fans. I get upset too. I can understand their frustration, but you can’t get as upset as me. I sat on my own and cried for 15 minutes [after the loss].”
Carige never played a match in the NRL again, signing on with Salford for one more year in the UK Super League.
That 1998 season was Smith’s second in charge.
“At various times, we were innovative and powerful and a lot of things the Parramatta club did in that time that set the tone for the rest of the competition,” Smith says. “We were good enough on any given day.”
Just not good enough on the day that mattered most, like the 2001 grand final, in which Smith’s side were overwhelming favourites.
They had started the year indifferently, and halfback Jason Taylor was playing so poorly that Smith foreshadowed his retirement.
“I’ll give you two weeks off to freshen up and put you back in – then I’ll tell you whether you should retire,” Smith told him.
“Oh, OK,” Taylor responded.
Taylor returned and the Eels caught fire, winning 18 of 19 games – including a 40-0 win over Newcastle.
“But nobody looks at the footnotes,” Smith says. “Johns and [hooker Danny] Buderus didn’t play. We lost two games in all that time, and one was the grand final. But we should never have been the favourites to win. Newcastle, with the likes of Johns, Buderus and Ben Kennedy, had so many more rep players.”
Grand final folklore suggests Smith blew that match through his preparation by overloading his team. “He’s technical, he’s analytical,” Carige said. “I wouldn’t say he was a people person. He got uptight when it came to big games. He probably shouldn’t have turned up in 2001 – that team might have won. If he’d had that week off sick, they probably win it.”
Johns has said before he knew his side had the Eels’ measure at the grand final breakfast when Eels players looked spooked.
“The Johnses were the masters of playing the psychological games,” Smith says. “The Knights just decided that the breakfast they were gagging and laughing and we were deer in the headlights. I think that’s been very unfair. Even if they made it up … It’s like Bennett with his fake game plan in 1993. Some guys will do whatever it takes to win the game. I’m not one of those people.”
Hindmarsh rejects it, too: “They like to carry on about the breakfast. There’s nothing we could’ve done differently for that grand final that would’ve changed the result.”
Which brings us to 2009 and the year the Eels boarded the Hayne Train – as it was known – all the way to Sydney Olympic Park, where the Storm were waiting.
Until that match, no team could find a solution to stop Parramatta’s fullback. The more dangerous he became, the more defences held off him, giving him yet more time and space.
The Storm, though, were experts at shutting down the opposition’s best player. “Any time he got the ball in his hands, someone went and got him,” Storm captain Cameron Smith wrote in his autobiography The Storm Within. “After that defender went at him, the next one had to follow, and the next one after that, until we smothered him”.
Jarryd Hayne’s electrifying run through the 2009 season came to shuddering end against the Storm in the grand final.Credit:Steve Christo
Melbourne won 23-16. “We were given a grand final lesson by a side who knew grand finals better than anyone,” Mannah says.
That was Mannah’s first season in the NRL. He figured making grand finals would be the norm, not the exception.
“Then we had four different boards, six CEOs, six different coaches,” he says. “You could never predict what was coming. We’re a huge club in the heartland of rugby league. It’s a powerhouse that demands success and we [the players] haven’t delivered. We want to get the gorilla off the back. Every Parra player, coach, administrator of the club wants to shake that tag off the longest premiership drought. Because we’re sick of looking back to the 1980s.”
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