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Langer would be an Immortal if he was from NSW: Bennett
July 29, 2018
Wayne Bennett is certain if champion Broncos halfback Allan Langer had played his football in NSW he would have been made an Immortal.
Before Rugby League Week magazine announced the eighth Immortal in 2012 a short-list was prepared and Langer was on it. A prestigious judging committee, of which Bennett was a member, voted and Andrew Johns was inducted.
Bennett did not say Johns was undeserving of the gong, while holding out hope Langer would one day join the select group.
The Broncos coach said Langer was the greatest and most influential player at the most successful club of the last 30 years, who dominated the rugby league landscape for a decade in his 258-game career.
"I believe he is the best Bronco and the most influential player in my time here,” Bennett told NRL.com.
"I have never doubted that, but he had some able partners believe me. At the height of his playing career he was 72kg and he played against some big men in that era, but he shone.
"He was a star for a decade. In my opinion, he was the best player in the game for a decade. He gave his best every weekend."
He did not make the short-list for the 2018 Immortals ceremony which will be held in Sydney on Wednesday but Bennett said Langer’s record of four premierships for Brisbane, which included a Clive Churchill Medal in 1992, and his State of Origin and Test records all led to the conclusion that "his career stacks up with anyone that has played the game".
"Joey Johns started to come on the scene through the middle 1990s and he had the NSW push behind him,” Bennett said.
"He was a wonderful player Joey. It was just that Alf got lost in it all…but if he’d been down in NSW Alf would have been Immortalised there is no doubt about that. I don’t just reckon. I know…and he may well yet be one."
Langer, who played 34 Origin games for Queensland and 24 Tests for Australia, had the ball on a string when it came to his short kicking game and won countless games on his own with his off-the-cuff running game. He was also an instinctual reader of play who seized any opportunity to set up his support players.
Former Brisbane, Queensland and Australian centre Gene Miles could not understand why Langer's name "never seems to be mentioned" when the Immortal topic is raised.
"To be his size and his weight and play in a game that is so physical… and yet he could do things that us mortals couldn’t do.
"Once the experienced guys like myself and Wally had moved on at Brisbane he took on the responsibility as captain of the club and led the Broncos to four titles in his own marvellous way.
“Despite being the clown and good time Charlie that he was, on game day he would always do his stuff. I had retired by then but from 1992 until the end of the decade he was just so dominant."
Miles points to the Ipswich product's mastery of ball stealing and bringing down big men with the 'Langer throw', where he would grab them with one arm and toss them over his leg, as revolutionary and game changing.
"They had to change two rules because he was so dominant in that period," Miles said.
"One was ball stealing. They had to reconfigure that rule because he was just so good at it and it was the difference between winning and losing games.
"He would get his little ferret hands and little ferret head in there and somehow steal the ball like a thief in the night, no matter how much the coaches would have drummed into their players ‘when you see Langer, grip onto that ball tighter than you normally do’.
"He was also doing the ‘Langer throw’ in the tackles and they had to tinker with that. He’d mastered it. That is how he overcame the size and weight difference between him and the gorillas in the game.”
That rule was tweaked so that a defender had to have two hands on the attacker rather than the one that Langer would employ.
It is the State of Origin arena where Langer reigned supreme.
From 1987 to 2002 he was the Maroons half, apart from the Super League period and his time in England.
He won four man of the match awards in pivotal games in Origin history. Langer's first gong was in the 1987 decider, his third game, and the following year in game one in Sydney he backed it up in the only Origin match Wally Lewis missed in his career.
With the Super League war over it was Langer who orchestrated a 24-23 comeback win in game one of the 1998 series. He left the Origin scene in 2002 with his final man of the match award in the 18-all draw which helped the Maroons retain the shield.
The previous year he had been brought back from England by Bennett for the 2001 decider in Brisbane a month shy of his 35th birthday and produced a stellar performance.
"We’d got towelled up in Sydney in game two and I remember distinctly we were driving back to the team hotel in the players’ bus with Wayne Bennett, and he had made his mind up then that he was going to bring Alf back,” Miles, chairman of Queensland selectors at the time, recalled.
"We were sitting across the aisle from each other and Bennett said, ‘I think I’ve got the answer. We’ll see what the rules are about bringing Alf back’.
"First up I thought he was off his rocker, but when he explained how it would work it all made sense. We all knew what Alf could do."
The pressure was immense but wearing the No.7 jersey he had made his own, Langer did not disappoint.
"He had been there and done it 1000 times before and he admits he was as nervous as he’d ever been before he ran out,” Miles said.
"NSW scored first, but then it was just a procession and Alf just excelled with everything he touched. He is three foot seven, but still put the ball down over his head for that famous try with gorillas hanging off him.”
Bennett initially was not convinced about Langer's capacity to handle Origin.
When coach of the Maroons in 1987 he was underwhelmed by Langer's performance for Brisbane against Penrith in a National Panasonic Cup clash, and then again in a trial between NSW-based and Queensland-based Maroons where Laurie Spina and Kevin Walters had outplayed him.
"But I got overruled by Dud Beattie who was the chairman of Queensland selectors at the time," Bennett said.
"He’d been talking to Tommy Raudonikis who coached Alf at Ipswich, and Raudonikis said he was by far the best player at his club and in the state."
Before making his Origin debut, Bennett took Langer on a Queensland Residents tour of New Zealand, the perfect prelude for what was to come. "The thing with Alf was that he needed to be liked," he said.
"On that tour he let everyone know what a fun guy he was and that gave him confidence and belief in himself because they all rallied around him."
Miles also recalled several teammates had doubts about Langer.
"In 1987 it was commonly known that a lot of players had doubts about this little bloke from Ipswich handling it at that level, although I was not one of them," Miles said.
"He went out and proved that he deserved to be at that level and dominated in that position for the next 15 years.
“With his stature he should not have been able to do what he did in the Origin and Test arena. He was targeted but whatever they threw at him he handled."
Langer's Test career was interrupted by the Super League war but he was a mainstay of the Australian side from 1990 until 1994 where he won a World Cup final, and for most of that period kept Ricky Stuart out of the Test team.
In 1998 he led his club, state and country to NRL, Origin and Test series wins and became the first captain in history to do so.
Langer gave belief to all the little people with a passion to play rugby league at the highest level, as the likes of Billy Slater and Anthony Milford have mentioned in the past month.
He is not yet an Immortal but the Queensland Government will immortalise Langer in bronze out the front of Suncorp Stadium along with Mal Meninga, Arthur Beetson, Darren Lockyer and Lewis.
“And so he should be out the front of that stadium with Meninga, Beetson, Lockyer and Lewis," Miles said.
"He was as good as all those guys."
Source: NRL.com
