Fearing his team was about to be gutted with the loss of its biggest names to the likes of the Roosters, Raiders chief executive John McIntyre phoned News boss Ken Cowley.All the Canberra players signed except for halfback Ricky Stuart. At six o’clock one morning, ARL boss John Quayle, Kangaroos coach Bob Fulton and NSW coach Phil Gould boarded Packer’s Learjet and flew to Canberra.
Jason Mathie is the Raiders’ commercial and marketing manager but on that night he was pulling beers.The team was based at the leagues club in those days and Mathie would notice coach Tim Sheens still working away in his office, studying video, when he turned the lights off in the bar at 2am.David Furner had the Clive Churchill Medal around his neck. News filtered through that Jason Croker had been named in the Kangaroos team, adding to the celebration.
It’s here at Northbourne where the club’s $19 million high-performance centre is only months away from completion. Adjacent to that, work is continuing on 98 apartments and 48 terraces. “I said to him, ‘The place to hear that is in my board room’,” McIntyre recalls. “To his credit, he came to a board meeting and apologised. We’ve never considered ourselves to be of a lesser light than any of the club.”
“We’re tougher than those people,” he says. “And we know who the people are who said it and take joy and satisfaction in proving them wrong. And in a humble, respectful way. There’s not a club in the competition that looks after its own the way we do. If you buy into this club, it buys into you.” “Sacking all three of them was a massive issue for our board,” Don Furner says. “We felt we did the right thing, but you’re not rewarded for it. You are penalised because they end up at other clubs. They weren’t players on their way out, they were in the prime of their careers. They came back playing for other clubs and beat us. You think the fans were happy about that? People say, ‘You’ve got a good culture now’. We always had a good culture because we made those tough decisions then.
It’s the first and only time in 37 years the Raiders have sacked their coach … who had won the Clive Churchill Medal in 1994.Ricky Stuart is putting up spiral bombs at the end his side’s first training of grand final week at GIO Stadium. In another life, it was called Bruce Stadium and Stuart was the Raiders halfback, not their coach.
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