Party pies and Macca's at Mittagong: Foundation Raiders reminisce about game one
Up the Hume they went, back with a belting they came. But none of the foundation Canberra Raiders will ever forget game one for the club, Saturday 27 February, 1982
THE INAUGURAL Canberra Raiders who prepared for the club’s first game in the New South Wales Rugby Football League competition, at Redfern Oval, Saturday 27 February 1982, may have had an idea about the fanaticism of South Sydney Rabbitohs fans. Not completely, perhaps. Not full immersion. But they’d have heard tales.
They’d have heard the one about the family which had a pet rabbit they named after their hero, Ron Coote. When Coote left Souths to join the Roosters – in Bunny lore, akin to renouncing Australia to join ISIS-K - they killed the rabbit. Then they cooked it and ate it.
There was the one about the gypsy woman who cursed the Roosters for taking Coote to Bondi Junction1. There’s a thousand more. Souths have so many feuds that Russell Crowe commissioned a big leather-bound book of them.
But Redfern was still an eye-opener for a bus full of bushies.
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