Still bitter, Cronulla great Greg Pierce has recalled the “farce” which cost him the chance to lead the Sharks to grand final glory over Manly as the clubs prepare to write another chapter in one of rugby league’s fiercest rivalries.
Ask Pierce when the Sharks lost their best opportunity to win their long-awaited maiden premiership and he’ll tell you it was in 1978.
Pierce captained Cronulla to a 17-12 win over Manly in a major preliminary semi-final only to cop a “devastating” suspension in the following week’s grand final qualifying triumph over Western Suburbs.
The club’s first-ever Kangaroo was given a four-match ban for a high tackle on firebrand front-rower John Donnelly, ruling him out of the title decider.
Cronulla and Many drew 11-11 in Pierce’s absence, but the battered Sharks were unable to back up three days later and lost the grand final replay 16-0 at the SCG.
The defeat and his controversial suspension still sting 35 years later.
“It was a farce that I was suspended and I think it cost Cronulla its best-ever opportunity to win a grand final,” Pierce told AAP.
“I wanted to be there. I wanted to give Cronulla its best-ever shot at a grand final win.
“When we went to the replay, we had a very much depleted side through injuries … that’s why we got smashed.”
Their Pierce-led 1978 victory over Manly remains the Sharks’ sole finals win over Manly in eight tries over 40 years of Battle of the Beaches clashes.
The Sharks also lost the infamous 1973 grand final, considered the most brutal premiership decider on record, to the Sea Eagles.
No wonder club greats say beating the Sea Eagles at Allianz Stadium on Friday night to book a berth in the grand final qualifier would be extra special.
“When I was playing we would call them the Silvertails, because they were North Shore and they could always afford the good players,” said 1973 grand final prop Cliff Watson.
“Everyone wanted to beat Manly. They were the Silvertails and we were just the ordinary footballers.”
Cronulla’s champion English halfback Tommy Bishop has no doubt that the two beachside clubs’ intense rivalry was born in that 1973 grand final, a brutal, gritty match often likened to a bar-room brawl.
The Sharks’ captain-coach that year, Bishop attributes most of the game’s dark side of that era to the “Malcolm Reilly factor”.
The beefy Manly forward was considered to be asking for it after elbowing Ron Turner in the face in an earlier game that season, splitting the Cronulla hooker from his lips to his eyebrows.
“Mal Reilly was the baby-faced assassin who broke more jaws than Sonny Liston,” Bishop recalled.
“If we let him dictate and dish it out and not respond, we were going nowhere.
“So it was payback time for Ronnie in many ways.”
Turner had his revenge on Reilly in the opening minutes, hurling himself at the brawny Englishman as he attempted a clearing kick.
His knee found Reilly’s hip and he was forced off, making a desperate reappearance for 10 minutes before finally succumbing to the injury at halftime.
“When he came back on, he took Greg Pierce out, and (Cronulla fullback) Warren Fisher as well. Greg still doesn’t remember the game, actually.”
Pierce, though, was sure he at least remembers Bishop harboured a secret tactic to play rough that day.
“Tommy’s strategy was to put the pressure on Manly from the start. He started whacking a couple of guys in the chin,” Pierce said.
“The best-kept secret in the Sutherland Shire before that grand final was that that was the way it was going to be played.”
Watson – another English Test import – said it was just natural back then for the forwards to spend the first 10 minutes “softening the other side up”.
“But the unfortunate thing was it lasted for 80 minutes,” he said.
“They didn’t take a back step and we didn’t take a back step.”
Even if they don’t know all the details, the history isn’t lost on Cronulla’s class of 2013 who say their motivation to win on Friday night is simple.
“Manly’s Manly. Everyone hates them, don’t they?” said Sharks hooker Isaac de Gois.
Second-rower Anthony Tupou agreed: “I never really liked ’em.”
But Manly prop George Rose is happy to heap more misery on long-suffering Sharks fans.
“I know we’ve broken their hearts many years ago,” Rose said.
“Hopefully we can do it again.”