1990's 'That Rugby League Album' is Still The Best Rugby League Album

With another bruising NRL season just around the corner, Aaron Hawkins pines for the simpler times of Jim Haynes’ 1990 classic That Rugby League Album.

“You know a lot of people reckon, that Jeff Fenech, he can fight
But you know he gets it easy cos he fights one bloke a night
But when he’s on the football field and wearing red and green
That other Fenech, Mario, he fights the whole thirteen”
– ‘The Team In Red & Green’

When I was seven I blew all my Christmas music vouchers on a tape of comedy rugby league songs.

That Rugby League Album was the soundtrack of my summer, played on repeat on my Walkman during bleak camping trips. After hunting for it for years, never meeting a single other person who had heard of it, I started to think the whole thing may have been a figment of my imagination.

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Recently I discovered the whole album has been uploaded to YouTube. All eighteen of Jam Haynes’ rugby league ditties, drowning in nostalgia for epic battles past. They are every bit as preposterous as I remember.

1990. The Winfield Cup. ‘Simply The Best’. It was the rock ‘n’ roll era of rugby league, and Jim Haynes wasn’t having a bar of it. Anxieties of the sport ‘losing its way’ are all over the album. Working class heroes and the old Sydney clubs are exalted, while big money clubs cop the most heat. There are lamentations on the preference of wine bar liberals for theatre over footy (‘Eastern Suburbs Roosters’), and cod reggae classics revelling in the collective dislike of the Northern Beaches’ big spenders (‘Manly Warringah’).

The only competition for the Sea Eagles title as 1990’s Most Hated comes from that other state: “They’ve won no finals, what a shame / They haven’t got an Aussie name / The buckin’ Brisbane Brrr-on-cos”. One only assume this oompah shade was exactly what spurred Alfie and Wayne Bennett on to build the most successful club of the 90s.

The record isn’t just sentimental for cold pies, warm beer, and no-nonsense “Vs and Stripes” jerseys. In league’s brutish sea of hypermasculinity, there’s still room for an emotional country ballad of high hopes run aground on Cronulla shores. Our humble narrator takes his girlfriend to the footy where, predictably, she falls in love with dynamic heartthrob and Amiga video game star Andrew “ET” Ettingshausen. He’s had “a broken heart attack, a romantic shark attack”, but the quiver in his voice betrays more than a hint of jealousy of his lost love.

It’s fitting that the album’s best song is reserved for the league’s then-best team: the Canberra Raiders. It pairs one universal truth with another – public resentment towards government and all who work for her.

“In Canberra politicians, are thick upon the ground
The football team they wear bright green, the best team going round
Just like public servants they work 90 minutes a week
And make whoever they’re dealing with feel like they’re up the creek.

There’s a rumour down in Canberra, that an order came from Bob
“Ahh give each Canberra Raider, a politician’s job”
John Ferguson should make the change without a fuss or row
He’ll run around in circles, just the same as he does now

Big Mal will have to change his name from Meninga, to Ma-linger
He’ll never break that arm again, he’ll never lift a finger
And what about the wingers? Well in cabinet they’d be fine
They don’t like tackling problems, and they’re offside most of the time.”

It’s enough to bring a tear to the eye.