At the Havelock Square End Mark Ella scored the try that broke Ireland, folding on to the ground, like he was landing in a parachute. He had started the move, too, catapulting Michael Lynagh through a gap that Ella had made with a soft, late pass. What he did next was the essence of his imagination.
A camera behind the other goal tracked his movement, gliding behind five Australian players, like he was chaperoning the ball, not allowing it out of his sight. He ran a diagonal line, covering the ground with urgent strides, until he was the man over. Nine seconds after he released Lynagh, the ball returned to him. On a string; on command.
The Australian team that toured these islands 40 years ago streaked across grey skies, like a flare. They were powerful, hard-nosed, charismatic, exhilarating. “The Wallabies’ rugby transcended patriotism and left anyone with a real feeling for the game enchanted,” reported The Scotsman. After Ella scored in Lansdowne Road there was a bipartisan wave of applause.
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The four-test Grand Slam was completed in Edinburgh, the only time that Australia have managed such a feat. Against England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland they scored 12 tries and conceded just one. Ella, the Wallaby 10, was the only player to score a try in all four Tests.
“Their attacking rugby was off the planet,” says Donal Lenihan, who played against them for Ireland, Munster and the Barbarians on that tour. “Ella was the fulcrum for all that. He was the genius. Michael Lynagh was young but he will tell you that what he learned off Ella on that tour set him up for life.
“Ella had that famous saying, ‘If I touch the ball twice, Australia score. If I touch the ball three times, I score.’ And that’s the way he played.”
Against Ireland he was true to his manifesto. He had the ball in his hands 32 times and kicked it just five times, including two sweet drop goals. Every other play was a pass or a line-break. Whatever cards he was holding he pushed a stack of chips into the middle of the table.
All these years later, he remains an alluring figure. At the end of that tour Ella retired from rugby. He was just 25. Before he left this part of the world he worked in London for five months and was married within a week of returning to Australia. It was five years before he graced a rugby field again.
“I still shake my head at it,” says Andrew Slack, who captained Australia on that tour. “It was like Barry John [the brilliant Welsh outhalf who retired at 27]. The admirable thing is that rugby league teams offered him a lot of money, but he was true to himself and said, ‘No, I’ve had enough of this.’”
Ella has answered the question a million times over the last 40 years, as if it is a cold case still and the mystery is unsolved. Retiring then, at the zenith of his brilliance, never caused him a sleepless night, he says. Rugby’s formal embrace of professionalism was still a decade away, and those overseas tours were long and intrusive.
I guess for the first couple of years we probably used to win a lot of games with our fists. But then, towards the end, we realised that beating them by 50 or 60 points hurt them more
— Mark Ella
Australia arrived on these shores early in October, and having played 18 matches, they left halfway through December. By 1984, Slack reckons the players were given a stipend of Aus$300 a week on tour, but when he and Ella started in the late 1970s, it was only a fraction of that amount.
“Rugby’s a great game, but it wasn’t earning me money,” Ella said years later. “I wasn’t bored, I just wanted other challenges. I wanted some control, not someone telling me to be at training three times a week.”
“I had a job, but I needed to make sure I kept my job,” he says now. “I guess the rugby community was flabbergasted that I had decided to retire, but I needed to come home and start my life again. That was it. I just moved on.”
It is rare for sports people to achieve anything that aspires to permanence. Ella had done that: in 1982, he became the first indigenous Australian to captain the Wallabies, holding the honour for 10 of his 25 Test caps.
“I’d be stupid if I said it didn’t mean much to me,” Ella says. “I don’t really talk about it a lot. I try to downplay it, but the reality is, being the first indigenous player to captain a Wallaby side was important.”
Very few indigenous Australians played rugby union but Ella, his twin brother Glen and another brother Gary, attended one of the few state schools that played the game: Matraville High in the La Perouse suburb of Sydney.
“We won the state schoolboy competition three times, and we started getting a crowd,” Ella says. “I don’t think they ever saw indigenous players play union, so they used to come out of curiosity. There was six of us [on the school team]. Not far away from us was an indigenous mission, which meant there was an indigenous population. So if, for instance, somebody said rude things about us [on the pitch], they had to pick on six of us.
“I guess for the first couple of years we probably used to win a lot of games with our fists. But then, towards the end, we realised that beating them by 50 or 60 points hurt them more.”
The three Ella brothers played together on a famous Australian schoolboy tour of Ireland and Great Britain in 1977 when the tourists scored 110 tries in 19 matches and conceded just six. Just two years later, Mark was in the Wallabies squad.
Until he was removed from the captaincy, Ella’s career only had one trajectory. At the beginning of 1984, Alan Jones had taken over as Australia’s coach and he wanted to make a change. They didn’t see “eye to eye,” Ella said years later. In any case, it was a shock.
“It took me a little while to calm down,” he says now. “But to be honest, there was a young guy called Michael Lynagh coming through, and I was probably cruising a little bit because I was captain. I had to pull my finger out and actually start working a bit harder. At the end of the day, it was probably better for me.”
Before this year’s tour, Australian television made a documentary about the 1984 side and in that programme, Ella said he approached Jones about having a more influential role for the northern hemisphere tour; Jones agreed.
“I was unaware that he had spoken to Jonesy [until the programme was broadcast], saying that he really wanted to take charge,” says Slack. “I thought he already had from a playing perspective in the All-Blacks Tests [before the tour]. But he obviously seemed to make an issue on that with Alan.
“But that was how it should be. He was a big-time leader in that regard [on the pitch]. Some would argue, and I think he himself would argue, that some of the other stuff captains had to do probably didn’t sit into his wheelhouse so easily. We’re good friends. He played bloody well, and it worked out, whatever the background to it.”
Five years after he retired Ella made a comeback with Randwick, the club he had joined after school. Not long after that, he landed in Italy, one of the few places in the amateur era where the game was awash with money.
“Initially, I was going over for a year because the interest rates here [on home loans] were crazy,” says Ella. “It went to about 19 or 20 per cent. A mate of mine, David Campese, was playing in Italy and I said, ‘Get me over there.’ About two weeks later I was playing for Milan. God bless Silvio Berlusconi [who bankrolled the club], he certainly looked after Campo, but he also looked after me – with what he had left.
“I ended up staying for four or five years. The club manager came up and said, ‘We want you to coach the team.’ I said, ‘I’ve never coached before, but okay, I’ll do it.’ He said, ‘That’s good. You win, you stay, you lose, you go.’ Those were his words. We won three of the next four Premierships.”
Around that time Bob Dwyer led Australia to the 1991 World Cup. Dwyer had recruited the Ella brothers for Randwick when they were teenagers and, in his book, The Winning Way, Dwyer devotes a fond chapter to them. In the closing paragraph, he writes about the last-minute try that devastated Ireland in the 1991 World Cup.
“It was a classic Mark Ella-type try,” wrote Dwyer. “Michael Lynagh did exactly what Ella would have done. I felt proud at the time that there was a bit of Mark Ella in our World Cup victory.”
Lynagh had studied at the feet of the master.
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