Outside Peter Wynn’s famous sporting goods store on Church Street in Parramatta this week, Raj Singh – wearing an Eels hoodie and waiting for the rain to pass – recalled being caught up in a crowd of fans when he first arrived in Australia from Fiji in 1986.
“I didn’t know much about rugby league then, but there were people all over the city, I had just arrived here as a student so it was crazy,” Singh says.
“The streets were just full of people celebrating when they won and I just fell in love with the club then.
“I learned more about rugby league and trained in a team. But honestly I thought, ‘this club’s pretty good, they’ll do well’.”
Singh didn’t know it at the time, but it would be a long time between celebrations.
The Eels have come close since – losing both the 2001 and 2009 grand finals and finishing minor premiers in 2005. But that 1986 premiership marked the end of the club’s one and only golden run, spanning a first title in 1981 and two follow-ups in ’82 and ’83.
This Sunday, the Eels return to the summit to face reigning premiers, the Penrith Panthers, in the grand final. It is a mouth-watering prospect for the NRL: two western Sydney rivals in their pomp, facing off in the game’s show-piece.
But in Sydney’s sprawling west, it means loyalties are being tested.
As Father Chris del Rosario and Deacon Adam Carlow posed for photos in Eels scarves outside the Parramatta Cathedral this week, a senior vicar joked it could be a career limiting decision. The Parramatta Catholic diocese, after all, covers Penrith too.
“I’m fine with that,” Carlow quips back, waving a blue and gold flag. “Go the Eels.”
Though Carlow hopes God is on the Eels side, he can’t be sure. After all, the club has a long history with the church, not all of it friendly.
In the late 1950s, as the club struggled for money and players, a proposal for a leagues club opposite a local Catholic school drew the ire of the local priest, Monsignor Joseph McGovern, who took the Eels to court over the plan.
He won by arguing that the leagues club would, among other things, have a view into the girls’ boarding school across the road.
One of the architects of the plan for the leagues club, Jack Boyle, was himself a devout Catholic and his son, John, who himself became a priest, remembers coming home to tell his father the happy news.
“I came home saying, isn’t this terrific, we prayed for the success of this court case at school and it worked,” Boyle says.
“My father wasn’t real happy about that. I suppose he had divided loyalties.”
The court battle – along with the Eels’ long wait for their first premiership after their entry into the competition in 1947 – gave birth to a belief that McGovern had cursed the club, Boyle told the Guardian this week.
The way Boyle tells the story, when Pope John Paul the II survived a shooting in 1981 and forgave his would-be assassin, the Catholic parishioners decided that it was time McGovern – who had died 17 years earlier – to forgive the Eels too.
“They won their first premiership that year,” Boyle says.
“Then the fans burned the stadium down. I remember the parishioners believed it had a purifying effect on the jinx. It lifted it. Although it seems to have come back.”
That one of the largest and most-storied league clubs in Australia could go more than three decades without lifting the premiership trophy seems incongruous somehow, a statistical oversight.
Yet the years since that final premiership have been marked by periods of significant turbulence at the club; an almost decade of indifference spanning the 90s where, as one fan put it this week, players would go unrecognised when visiting local schools. The wasted promise of Jarryd Hayne’s now-marred reign of dominance, and the nadir of the 2016 salary cap scandal which saw the NRL sack the club’s board.
In 2016, incoming Eels CEO Bernie Gurr described the club as the “sleeping giant” of Australian sport, pointing to its location in the booming centre of league’s heartland, and a financial heft and fanbase few clubs can compete with.
And the club’s reemergence as a force in the NRL has coincided with a renaissance in the city itself.
The 1981 fire came as plans for a new stadium had been delayed by opposition from local environment groups. The story goes that jubilant fans took matters into their own hands by stripping the ground for souvenirs and then burning it down.
Peter Wynn, who was part of those premiership-winning Parramatta squads before opening his store in 1988, remembers watching it from the leagues club where he was celebrating the win.
“I just saw this orange glow coming up from the ground,” Wynne said. “The oval had this old white picket fence, and you wouldn’t believe how many times over the years I’ve had people come in and ask me to sign one that they pinched on the night.”
Though it is one of the most iconic touchstones in rugby league folklore, the fire also stands as a handy metaphor for Parramatta, the place. Sydney, unlike any other Australian city, has a sort of unwieldiness to it – a sense of impermanence. Though fire may not be the conventional method, it’s a city that doesn’t let anything get in the way of progress.
Ask any longtime resident about the difference between Parramatta in the 80s and now, and the answer most reach for is “unrecognisable”.
Natalie Constable lived in Parramatta her entire life, and remembers her father taking her to the grand final breakfast in 1986, where she got a photo with Eels legend Brett Kenny. She moved to the Central Coast in 2000, and now gets lost when she visits to go to matches.
“It’s the thing where you think ‘I’ll go to that pub on the corner. Oh, wait, nope, that’s gone,” she says.
Billions of dollars in government investment have seen much of the CBD morph into a construction zone for the new light rail line and metro station. The skyline is dominated by glittering new apartment towers. What was once a staid, thoroughly working-class city is being recast as the western suburbs’ new cosmopolitan centre, with a burgeoning population attracting people from within Sydney and from overseas.
That change has brought with it adjustments for the city and the Eels.
This week Stephen McRae was one of the few Panthers fans wandering down the main strip. He had driven down from Townsville, where he has lived for the past few years.
He made the move after realising he could sell his one-bedroom apartment in Parramatta and buy a three-bedroom home in Townsville.
“You see what’s happening around here and it does blow your mind a bit,” he says.
“I do think it’s positive though, there’s a real sense of things happening.”
Peter Younan, who was there in 2009 and recalls feeling “heartbroken”, says the Eels have been a sort of “anchor” through that change. “It’s something for people to hold on to,” he says. “They’re the heart of Parramatta.”
It has brought an optimism about the city’s future, one that is bleeding into the fanbase.
“This is the year the drought ends,” Younan says.
“I can just feel it.”
