‘I wish mum and dad were still here to see it’: The Arthurs’ 75 years of Eels devotion

There would be very few of the 5266 fans who watched Parramatta’s first game of rugby league at Cumberland Oval in 1947 that remain on this planet.

Brad Arthur’s father, Ted, is one of them. The Arthur bloodline at Parramatta runs through five generations.

Ted’s grandfather Linday was there on that first day, carrying his four-month old grandson through the gates. Ted’s mother, Joy, too.

She would go on to become the secretary of the Parramatta supporters club, which would grow significantly by the time the club won its first premiership in 1981.

Sadly, Ted’s father passed away a year before that historic day. His son, having watched the drought-breaking triumph inside the club’s Leagues Club, celebrated in his father’s honour out the back of Cumberland Oval as flames engulfed the stand.

“Everyone just started yelling ‘fire! There’s a fire outside!’” Ted recalled.

“We walked out the back and the grandstand was on fire. We all went over with a beer and stood around and watched it burn to the ground.”

Sitting inside his Blackheath home a few days out from the biggest day of his son’s life, Ted chokes back tears reflecting on the joy his son has given him.

From the two-year-old kid in his Parramatta jersey, who could kick a 50c plastic football onto the roof of their Quakers Hill home, to the now leader of the football club that the family has devoted its life to for three quarters of a century.

“I’m proud of everything he’s done,” Ted says.

“I’m proud that he’s done it for the fans. He’s done it for Parramatta. It’s not just about him and his players and staff. He wants Parramatta to get it.”

Toughness and resilience; two words often spoken about the man some Parramatta fans continue to refer to as “just a bush footy coach”.

When he arrived at Batemans Bay as captain-coach at the age of 22 in 1997, on the recommendation of his Panthers reserve grade coach Royce Simmons, Brad tore his ACL.

“Can I do any more damage?” Ted recalled his son asking the doctor. “No, but it’s completely stuffed, so you’ll have to get it fixed,” the doctor replied.

The next week, and for several others until the season ended, Brad strapped up his knee and took the field without an ACL.

Very little fazes him. Not even the Yarrabah locals who, during Brad’s eight seasons as captain-coach of Cairns, would often throw beer bottles at him from the bush and yell out “Parramatta reject” in his direction.

Six grand finals in eight years, including four premierships, later shut them up. It’s from there Brad’s reputation began to spread across the game.

Clint Zammit, who is now the recruitment manager of the Knights, put a phone call in to Melbourne Storm coach Craig Bellamy to let him know about the horticulturist doubling as a footy coach in northern Queensland.

By that stage Brad had met and married his wife Michelle, a Western Australian backpacking through the sunshine state who had never even heard of rugby league, let alone known who was running the local footy team.

The couple had already welcomed two children – Jakob and Matthew – into the world when Michelle entered the hospital to give birth to the couple’s third child, daughter Charlotte, in 2006.

Then the phone rang. It was Bellamy. “I was literally in the middle of giving birth to our third child,” Michelle recalled.

“We came out of the labour ward and there was a message on his phone that said ‘you have the job, you need to be here in six weeks’. People had often said to him ‘as if you’re going to be an NRL coach’.

“In his head, he was always going to be. He’s always been good at not being affected by other people’s opinions. Even when he got the job at Melbourne, my family would say to me: ‘Oh yeah but they’re not going to actually let him near the real players, right?’”

In 2012 Brad returned home to Parramatta as an assistant to Stephen Kearney, who was later sacked after winning just 10 of 42 games in charge.

The Eels needed a caretaker coach for the final six weeks of the 2012 season. “I still remember it,” his mother Lyn, who now lives in Hervey Bay, recalled.

“He was driving me to Parramatta station early one morning and he asked me if he should go for it. I still remember Royce Simmons telling him that he wasn’t going to make it as a player at Penrith, but he was going to make a great coach one day. I said: ‘Brad, you go for this job. You can do it’. And that’s how it all began.”

A lot has been spoken of the drama surrounding Brad’s full-time appointment as Ricky Stuart’s successor over Jason Taylor in 2014, and how Jarryd Hayne and Tim Mannah’s late plea to the board resulted in the bush coach earning the top job.

“Yeah, but this isn’t just a job,” his father says. “Brad doesn’t want to be anywhere else. He wants to be a Parramatta coach more than an NRL coach.”

Things weren’t easy to begin with. The results barely improved, with the Eels missing the finals in his first three seasons.

The third was marred by the salary cap scandal that rocked the club, denying the team of a finals berth they would have earned had they not been stripped of 12 points by the NRL for a series of breaches by head office.

“When they opened the closet they had more skeletons than Rookwood Cemetery,” Ted says.

It was the catalyst for the change the club desperately needed. The following year, as things began to clear off the field, Brad led the team to their first finals appearance in eight years.

Things were on the rise. At least that’s what they thought. “The next year they won the wooden spoon,” Michelle recalled.

“I’ve never seen Brad like that. Ever. He was completely, completely crushed. It was the lowest I’d ever seen him. He felt like he let everybody down, he felt like he let the fans down, his family down. He felt that fell solely on his shoulders.

“That year, that’s when he stopped being social. As the losses piled on, he stopped leaving the house. Brad used to be very social. He’s always been quite private but he’s very private now. He’s fine when they’re winning. When they’re losing he doesn’t want to face anyone.”

Despite keeping the Eels inside the top eight every week for the past four years, Brad’s future at the club has been a topic of great conjecture.

Internally there were doubts over his ability to take the team to a premiership, such was the frustration over repeated week-two finals wipeouts.

The pressure took a toll on his family, but it would pale into insignificance when it came to the scrutiny that followed the selection of his son, Jake Arthur.

“There are definitely times when he was really getting attacked where I was telling Brad: ‘Just don’t play him … Please don’t play him’,” Michelle said.

Over time Ted had learned to handle the constant scrutiny of his son. Although he struggled when it landed on his grandson.

“That was worse,” Ted said. “I can handle all the crap on Brad now. It doesn’t worry me any more because Brad is a grown man. But this is a boy. This is a boy! He’s just turned 20, but has been copping it since he was 18.

“You don’t have to go read in the paper all these terrible things said about your family. I feel like telling all those people out there ‘well tell us what your kids are doing this weekend? Tell us what’s going on in your family because you want to tear mine apart.’

“I’ve just learnt now, they don’t matter. My family matters.”

Ted speaks with great passion when it comes to Jake. He and his partner Carrol shed tears in the grandstand of CommBank Stadium a fortnight ago as they watched the Eels fans stand and applaud their grandson as he walked around the field after the win.

After Jake’s debut at Magic Round in Brisbane last year, his friends decided to get the number 815 tattooed on their arms to celebrate his place in Parramatta’s history.

“By the time they got to the tattoo parlour, they were that drunk they wouldn’t touch them,” Ted recalled.

Two weeks later, after Charlotte’s netball game, the family posed a for a photo together. Ted rolled up his sleeve flexing his muscles.

His grandkids were bemused, until Jake noticed the symbol of his grandfather’s pride in his accomplishments etched on his arm. #815.

It’s been 27,567 days since a four-month-old Ted Arthur was brought into the Parramatta family.

If you see him with a McDonald’s strawberry thick-shake on the way home from the grand final on Sunday night, it will mean his son and grandson have helped end the drought. Or, in his words, Parramatta will finally matter again.

“Parramatta has been gone a long time,” Ted said.

“But they’re back now. If they win, the Arthur name will be firmly entrenched in the history of Parramatta. I wish my mum and dad were still here to see it.”

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