SportingPulse Homepage for Wangaratta Rovers Football & Netball Club

We were there…

On a sunny September day in 1958, the Wangaratta Rovers clinched their first Ovens and Murray Premiership. Proud old Hawks broke down and wept that day, as they saw the culmination of their dreams.

We were there to record what is probably the most important moment in the Club’s history, just as we saw at first-hand almost everything else of significance that has happened to one of the finest of all country football Clubs.

It seems like an eternity now, yet it is just over fifty years since the fledging Club (a mere five years old at the time) overcame stern opposition from many quarters, to win the right to play Ovens and Murray football. We were at that league delegates meeting, arguing the case for admission and helping to smooth the path to recognition.

Most of the time we have been involved in some way or another – working behind the scenes, playing, chronicling and just plain watching – as the Club moved through its formative years, the fifties, sixties, the glorious seventies onto the heady successes of the late eighties and early nineties. The Hawks met the challenge to their very existence – the threat of financial ruin – in recent years and the way the players and administration overcame it is a story in itself and ranks among the Club’s finest achievements.

We look back on the pioneering spirit of those early days and recall long-serving secretary Frank Hayes describing the Club’s endeavors to build a new ground: “I only wish we had taken a photo of the ground when we started.” Hayes said “people don’t believe us when we tell them what it was like. We had to grub out very large trees. The oval had to be re-fenced. The Clubrooms had been a camp for swaggies, who used to light fires inside. I recall when we had to cart gravel from Eldorado for the banking. We had as many as fifty players and supporters helping. It a great team effort.”

It is teamwork which has been the backbone of the Club’s achievements off the field as well as on it. Men of vision, like Sam Alexander, Len Hill, Mannie Cochineas and Jack Maroney had the courage to make crucial decisions which rapidly propelled the Hawks from battler to football power. Successors of the ilk of Tom Tobin, Geoff Welch and Sam Perna continued to run a very tight ship, but by and large it was the hundreds of behind-the-scenes people who were the strength of the Brown and Gold and helped to provide the Rovers with a legion of on-field highlights.

We remember the flashbacks of triumph and skill and brawn and moments of taut drama and sometimes they merged. Les Gregory, slithering and sliding as he controlled the slippery sphere with the class of a juggler; Len Greskie belligerently turning back opposition attacks; Neville Hogan ranging far and wide to pick up countless possessions and pump the ball further afield with extraordinary
precision; a seventeen year old, Paul Bryce pulling down nineteen marks in a final – a performance which was to prove a stepping-stone to AFL ranks; a nippy blonde rover called Shane Wohlers helping to pull the Hawks back from a 40-point H time deficit to snatch a miracle win against a rampant Albury.

Rovers fans recoiled at Benalla one day, when crack centre half back Mervyn Holmes was caught awkwardly in a pack and carried from the ground in considerable pain. Holmes, the invincible… it was unthinkable that this great man’s career could be threatened. But, in a feat which stunned the medical men he fought back to fitness and a place in the Grand Final team only a couple of months later.

Bobby Rose probably did as much as anyone to put the Rovers on the map. “Mr. Football” was well-nigh unbeatable and a fair proportion of the people who saw him in his seven-year Ovens and Murray career, would rank him as the best player ever to come into the league. Many honors were bestowed upon him in the evening of his life, but few of these would outrank the satisfaction Rose gained from setting the downtrodden Hawks on the right path. “I was young when I left Collingwood, and things worked out well”, he once said. “My first duty was to get the Rovers on the road”. He brought a professionalism and enthusiasm to the Club and it has never really looked back.

In the Rose era, there were a group of personality players and local football reached a peak of appeal, which would be the envy of Clubs nowadays. It must have gladdened the hearts of young men like Les Clarke, Alan Bell and Keith Ottrey, who had shed plenty of blood and sweat for the success that was to follow.

The most colourful person to wear the Brown and Gold was Rose’s successor, Ken Boyd. Almost everything that big Ken said or did seemed to stir controversy. His appointment as coach prompted suspicious Hawks to bellow that their committee had made a calamitous “blue”, but soon he was idolised by those same people. His on-field toughness made him a legend and stories of his ruthlessness have lingered through the years.

It was partly Boyd’s enthusiasm and hundreds of hours of voluntary labour in 1965, that converted a second-rate Clubhouse into a magnificent two-storey edifice (later to be re-modelled and updated in 1980).

Boyd's coaching prowess helped the Hawks to flags in 1964 and ’65 and he introduced many players to senior ranks who were to become champions.

Players like Neville Hogan, the 1966 Morris Medallist, who would, a few years later, lead the Club to its finest era – the “Super Seventies”. In an eleven-year period under Hogan and Darrell Smith, the Hawks played in ten Grand Finals and won seven of them. Whilst it may seem that they were well-nigh unbeatable, this was not exactly so. In quite a few finals they went in as underdogs, but pulled out the extra effort that earned them a fearsome title as “finals specialists”.

One of the Club favorites in that era was a giant of a man, Mick Nolan, whose wonderful nature endeared him to those who crossed his path. Mick found fame and carved out a career for himself with North Melbourne. One of his team-mates in North’s immortal 1975 Premiership team was John Byrne, who had also cut his teeth at the City Oval.

Rovers employed stop-gap full forwards for years until a lean, acrobatic youngster emerged from junior league ranks. Steven Norman was on his way to becoming one of the finest O&M spearheads and booted staggering 1016 goals in 242 games.

He was a key component in the Rovers successes of the seventies, as were the 1975 Morris Medallist Andrew Scott, Leigh Hartwig, Barry Cook, Eddie Flynn and others.

The trouble was that the good times had to come to an end. The constant striving by other Clubs to reach the Hawks standard led to a nine-year premiership drought in the eighties, although they had finished in the top three on five occasions.

But Rovers supporters could ‘smell’ a flag half-way through the 1988 season. With a coaching tyro, Laurie Burt, at the helm and a group of youngsters under his charge, they eclipsed Lavington in the ‘big one’ after dropping only four games for the season. The “Class of 88” was to provide the backbone of some great Hawk teams in the nineties. Seven of them were to play 200 games on more for the Club, as the Rovers swept to flags in 1991, ’93 and ’94. They cruised to an unparalleled 36 wins on the trot at one stage, as they responded to the astute leadership of Laurie Burt, whose eleven-year reign as coach earned him a hallowed spot among the Club’s legends.

But what great support he had from the likes of 300-gamer Mark Booth, Anthony Pasquali, Peter Tossol, Ron Ferguson and the redoubtable Wilson brothers, who chalked up a tally of more than 800 games in Brown and Gold. And let’s not forget Robbie Walker, the best country footballer of the decade, winner of eleven Club Best and Fairests and five Morris Medals – a player who ranks alongside Rose and Hogan as best Hawks of all time.

The Rovers have played 1120 O&M games and have dropped only 399 of these. They have
missed only 12 finals series since 1956 and have played in 21 Grand Finals, winning 15 of these.

In 1993, the Rovers Netball Club came into being and achieved instant success with senior flags in the first two years of competition. It has played an important role in the functioning of a vibrant club.

We have gained plenty of enjoyment from watching the cavalcade of Hawks, as they took the Club to its exalted status. As we move into the new century a lot of new champions will arise and the fans will embrace them. We will be watching their progress intently…