Twenty years on, Tommy Raudonikis remembers ‘Cattledog’ like it was yesterday

Looking back on one of State of Origin’s most infamous fights – and the larger than life character who takes credit for it.

“Oh, he’s landed a right, right on the pecker!” – Ray Warren

If true blue New South Welshman Tommy Raudonikis wasn’t still very much alive and kicking, he would for sure be turning in his grave this week.

Just days out from Game 1 of State of Origin, New South Wales prop Aaron Woods has described Queensland as “a great bunch of fellas” and admitted he “got along really well” with the likes of Cameron Smith and Johnathan Thurston in Kangaroos camp last year.

Queensland great Mal Meninga has apparently brokered peace between the bitter rival states since taking over as coach of the national side last year. It’s good news for the Kangaroos, who haven’t been beaten with Big Mal at the helm, but has it taken the sting out of Origin?

It’s certainly a far cry from twenty years ago when Raudonikis was in charge of the Blues. 1997 was the year of the infamous ‘Cattledog’ call – and the Western Suburbs hard man has hardly stopped going on about it since.

He explained the method behind his signature move for the hundredth time during a Footy Show segment called ‘Tommy’s Timewarp’ earlier this year. He was wearing what has for him become a kind of uniform – a sky blue t-shirt with the word ‘CATTLEDOG’ and a dangerous looking cartoon canine on the front.

“I wanted a name for us to come to arms, to put a blue on,” he said, smacking his fist into his hand and grinning like a maniac. “Would we call it ANZAC? Would we call it Gallipoli? Jimmy Dymock put his hand up and said ‘coach, let’s call it the Cattledog’.”

The call was an instruction to his players to initiate an all-in brawl. “What it meant was to put a stink on when we’re in trouble,” he explained in a prior interview. “Spud [Mark] Carroll loved it.”

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The most famous ‘Cattledog’ came in Game 3 of the series – a dead rubber after New South Wales won the first two. Raudonikis remembers screaming it from the sidelines like it was yesterday. “The scrum packed down and Steve Menzies put his head up and said oh no not the dreaded Cattledog,” he laughed. “Poor old Steve Menzies couldn’t crush a grape.”

Menzies got the stuffing beaten out of him by Spud Carroll, and things quickly, inevitably, escalated. Somewhere in the melee Queensland hooker Jamie Goddard got hold of his opposite number Andrew Johns and delivered “about ten” brutal blows to the face.

After eventually being split up by the referee, Johns decided he would go back for more. He elegantly sidestepped the ref and took a swing at Goddard, who then – as Raudonikis tells it – “hit him with the best right hand you’ve ever seen and put him on his backside.”

“Johns has got blood streaming from a mouth wound” is how commentator Ray Warren called it. Johns himself only remembers coming to in the sheds with a medic’s needle in his mouth. He got 26 stitches in his lip before being ordered by his coach to “harden up” and get back out on the paddock.

There will still be flare-ups and maybe even a couple of haymakers thrown in this year’s State of Origin, but the days of calls like ‘Cattledog’ are well and truly in the past. It’s not all Mal Meninga’s fault – even Tommy Raudonikis accepts that’s the way it is. “You can’t do it today, but today’s today,” he shrugged in one interview.

Still, having a beer with the cockroaches after the game? That will go down about as well with Tommy Raudonikis as a plate of sushi or a cappuccino or any of the other things he denounces in his 2014 single ‘Harden Up’, performed here with his band – you guessed it – The Cattledogs.