Brisbane Rugby League 1972 season
League Table
| Team | Played | Won | Lost | Drew | For | Against | +/- | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wests | 21 | 17 | 4 | 0 | 497 | 271 | 226 | 34 |
| Easts | 21 | 12 | 8 | 1 | 382 | 330 | 52 | 25 |
| Valleys | 21 | 12 | 9 | 0 | 301 | 268 | 33 | 24 |
| Brothers | 21 | 11 | 9 | 1 | 356 | 292 | 64 | 23 |
| Norths | 21 | 11 | 10 | 0 | 348 | 306 | 42 | 22 |
| Souths | 21 | 11 | 10 | 0 | 391 | 350 | 41 | 22 |
| Redcliffe | 21 | 7 | 14 | 0 | 275 | 375 | -100 | 14 |
| Wynnum-Manly | 21 | 2 | 19 | 0 | 186 | 544 | -358 | 4 |
Rounds
| Round 1 | Round 2 | Round 3 | Round 4 | Round 5 | Round 6 |
| Round 7 | Round 8 | Round 9 | Round 10 | Round 11 | Round 12 |
| Round 13 | Round 14 | Round 15 | Round 16 | Round 17 | Round 18 |
| Round 19 | Round 20 | Round 21 |
Finals
| Stage | Date | Teams | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minor Semi-Final | 27 August 1972 | Valleys vs Brothers | Details |
| Major Semi-Final | 3 September 1972 | Easts vs Wests | Details |
| Preliminary Final | 10 September 1972 | Valleys vs Wests | Details |
| Grand Final | 17 September 1972 | Easts vs Valleys | Details |
President’s Cup
| Stage | Date | Teams | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Final | 21 May 1972 | Wests vs Brothers | Details |
Peter Scott Memorial Trophy
| Stage | Date | Teams | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Final | 13 August 1972 | Wests vs Souths | Details |
An Antarctic explorer and the fall of the west
The 1972 BRL season began in the wake of Tropical Cyclone Emily and the flooding of Brisbane which ensued. Brothers’ home at Corbett park went under and the club’s facilities sustainehe 1972 BRL season began in the wake of Tropical Cyclone Emily and the flooding of Brisbane which ensued. Brothers’ home at Corbett Park went under and the club’s facilities sustained serious damage, leaving the Fighting Irish homeless for the first few months of the season.
At one point, Brothers were reportedly conducting training sessions around the streets of Grange, before Souths (Davies Park), Norths (Bishop Park) and the Queensland Soccer Federation (Perry Park) stepped up and offered Brothers use of their grounds in in an admirable display of hospitality and inter-code harmony rarely seen since Aussie Rules lent the Gabba to the fledgling league game back in 1910. Who said the codes have to be at war?
As the city dried out, attention quickly turned west toward Purtell Park, home of a resurgent Wests team, and an increasingly urgent question arose: who can possibly stop them?
Coach Norm Pope and his Panthers won ten straight games to start the season, including an extraordinary 42-8 demolition of Valleys in round four, the President’s Cup and the Scott Trophy.
Roger Kuhn came over from Easts to supplement an already brilliant backline, led by halves John White and Greg Oliphant and flanked by the likes of elusive fullback Kevin Denman, goal-kicking winger Wayne Stewart, ‘Yogi’ Thompson and Eric Robinson. At its best, the forward pack featured dynamic young back-rowers Richie Twist and Ian Robson, giant prop Ray McCarron and wily veteran hooker Artie Connell. The vastly underrated utility Nev McDonald tried a new position, lock forward, and excelled, as he usually did.
Wests were eventually ‘stopped’, by a combination of Easts in the Major Semi-Final and Valleys in the Preliminary Final, but cracks had started to appear well before that.
Injuries were a factor. Denman and White went down for big chunks of the season. Twist managed only nine games before entering a recurring injury nightmare that he only really emerged from in 1976. But it was more than that.
There was also a vocal faction at the club who’d been vehemently opposed to the appointment of Pope as coach, in large part due to memory of his stiff-arm tackle on great Wests centre Alex Watson during the 1955 finals, with a bit of general anti-Valleys sentiment mixed in as well.
But none of that seemed to bother the team. Instead, there was a suspicion that Pope was a rather limited, one-dimensional coach. He was certainly adept at bringing a team together, motivating them and bringing about an upturn in performance, but when that initial upturn dissipated and others caught up, he seemed unable to adapt, even a touch naive. A similar pattern was observable at Valleys in the mid-1960s and Pope was, perhaps, the Kevin Walters of his era.
Greg Oliphant told Steve Haddan that Pope would turn up “on Tuesday at training with a revolutionary game plan, but he’d forget about it by Thursday and just tell us to go out and bash ’em”.
The fall of Wests, whatever caused it, was accompanied by the rise of Easts, with the Tigers winning their first premiership in 22 years behind a group of players who’d emerged over the previous four years and most of whom had been through and learned from defeat to Valleys in 1970.
BRL team of the century members Des Morris and John Lang were the pick. Burly prop Paul Khan wasn’t far behind. Rock-solid centres John Eales and John Atkin, son of 1950 premiership-winner Jack Atkin, were almost ever-present. Young back-rower Boris Crassini seized a place late in the season and scored in the decider. Half Lee Hutchinson, who would become something of a journeyman, had his one great season.
And there was an unlikely hero – lock Jeff Fyfe produced the winning play in a gripping 16-15 Grand Final victory over Valleys when he snapped a field goal – the first of his career – with a mere eight seconds on the clock to snatch victory for the Tigers.
Finally, we’ll finish this review of the 1972 season roughly back where we began – talking about Brothers and the weather.
Early in the season, the Courier Mail, reporting on developments in the Brothers team, printed one of the more remarkable sentences in the history of rugby league commentary when it noted that, “also training with Brothers was former Valley forward Jeff Callaghan, recently returned from another stint in the Antarctic”.
Callaghan hadn’t been spotted in the BRL since a brief stint in 1967 and it seems he’d spent some of the time since on an expedition to Antarctica with the Bureau of Meteorology, one of three expeditions totalling 33 months he undertook.
And all this was part of a distinguished and award-winning career in meteorology and academic research spanning several decades, alongside a life spent travelling the world, surfing, researching and somehow managing to also play first-grade rugby league when he wasn’t too busy with other things. What a remarkable person!
Who said rugby league players are all dense and uneducated? Probably some silver dessert spoon (no, not that dessert spoon!), trust-fund-suckler who frequents rugby union matches.
Not that we’ve got anything against the rugby unionists, you understand.
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