He Made It All Look So Easy

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday April 11, 2007

Greg Prichard

Andrew Johns has given league fans some wonderful memories, writes Greg Prichard.

THEY'RE making it sound like he's dead," my 12-year-old son, Jackson, said as we listened to tribute after tribute to Andrew Johns on radio yesterday afternoon. He was spot-on.

The tributes were pouring in, as when someone has died. Ricky Stuart, Allan Langer, Brad Fittler - these guys can be hard for us to find, but when a player with as big a name as Johns retires, people line up to speak.

It really was like someone had died, and the shock came from the fact we weren't ready for his retirement. Sure, there had been speculation over the weekend that this might be it for Johns, but there had been just as much to say that it wasn't nearly that bad.

Johns - and, so, the rest of us - hadn't been able to plan for the end, and that is why, when the end came, it was such stunning news.

The greatest memories of Johns, for me, have been the same for many years. They go back to the late 1990s, when his Newcastle side had already established itself as a force by winning the 1997 premiership and his brother, Matthew, was still playing.

The Knights would be pasting some poor, unfortunate opponents at EnergyAustralia Stadium, and the Johns boys would use the last 10 or 15 minutes of the games just to have fun. They would do the most outrageous things - kick to wingers on the second tackle - and almost everything would come off.

It was backyard stuff, like you imagine they had done so many times at home at Cessnock as kids, and it was brilliant. I remember writing at the time that it was worth the return drive from Sydney - and more - to see it live.

After games like that, in the dressing room, we would head straight for Johns and ask him, with smiles that said we had loved every minute of it, what the hell he had been up to. He would grin back as if to say, "Look, I know it wasn't in the game plan, but what the hell."

Andrew and Matthew toured for the first time together for Australia in 1995, to the World Cup in England. Australia won it, despite being without Super League-aligned players as the game's civil war heated up. The Australian coach, Bob Fulton, had Andrew and Geoff Toovey playing hybrid hooker-halfback roles within the same team. It worked perfectly.

Even when they weren't playing or training on that tour, the Johns brothers often still had a football in their hands. They would take one on a walk, and if you were nearby you could see them do incredible tricks, making the ball shoot back to one another from kicks or by throwing it with spin to the ground.

They are such different personalities, the Johns boys, but one thing that was the same about them when they played was their physical commitment to the cause. They were both built very strongly, and although they were halves whose skill had won them acclaim, they put their bodies on the line like second-rowers.

We shouldn't be surprised that they were both forced to quit because of serious neck problems. You don't get those playing in a dinner suit, as footballers like to describe it when someone waltzes through games hardly getting any dirt on their jumper.

Matthew is such an extrovert, yet Andrew goes through highs and lows and acts accordingly. He is one of those people who sometimes uses interviews as a cleansing mechanism and gives an honest, often raw account of how he is feeling about things, just to get it off his chest.

Those were the times when it was a privilege to get him, one on one, for a chat, Andrew could be as dark as midnight in the dressing room if Newcastle had lost or he'd had a poor game or, heaven forbid, both. But you got used to it.

I can say I was at the last game Andrew Johns played, but it doesn't mean much. It was at Canberra Stadium last Monday week and the Raiders had thrashed the Knights. Johns wasn't talking after the game. He sat with his head down in the dressing room.

I was quietly hoping Johns didn't go ahead and play State of Origin again this year. I didn't want him to risk a different finish to his Origin career than his performance in the 2005 series when he came back and played those two amazing games for NSW. That was the greatness of Johns all over, taking the Blues from one game down and hauling them over the line to win the series 2-1.

If you saw that and it didn't get your juices flowing, you must have been made of stone. Thanks for the memories, Joey. They are as good as they get.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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