Mention the rugby league Ashes, and it’s hard not to think of Adrian Morley, a brutal hit and a red card after just 12 seconds.<\/p>\n
Whatever happens when Australia visit this October and November, the series is unlikely to start quite as explosively as that first Test in Wigan 22 years ago.<\/p>\n
One of the most feared forwards in the game, Morley poleaxed Australia prop Robbie Kearns straight from the kick-off with a high tackle.<\/p>\n
The Great Britain forward, who played his club rugby in the NRL for Sydney Roosters at the time, was dismissed by referee Steve Ganson with the words: “Adrian. Adrian. It’s a real bad one. It’s across the chin. You’re off mate.”<\/p>\n
Morley’s former Great Britain team-mate Jon Wilkin said: “He said that when he got sent off, he was back in the dressing room before the mascot had taken his head off.<\/p>\n
“The mascot took his head off and said ‘What are you doing back in here?'”<\/p>\n
Wilkin, Jamie Peacock and Brian Noble have recalled the extraordinary incident for a new weekly BBC podcast which has its first episode released on Thursday – Rugby League Top 10.<\/p>\n
In the first episode, presenter Mark Chapman sets them the task of ranking the sport’s hard men.<\/p>\n
Former Great Britain captain Peacock, who played alongside Morley in that 2003 series, said: “His brother got to the game late. He got to his seat about 20 minutes in, and said ‘I think I’m going to put some money on. Has our Adrian scored?’ And someone replied ‘Well, you can ask him, he’s sat there’.”<\/p>\n
Each week Peacock, Noble and Wilkin will discuss, debate and argue over lists of the best players, games, finals and iconic moments in rugby league.<\/p>\n
But as Chapman pointed out, the lists don’t cover the entire history of rugby league, “because we’d be here for hours”, and nor are they restricted to the Super League era. Instead, “the cut-off point for these lists is roughly 40 years ago”.<\/p>\n
Morley, the first British player to win a Grand Final in both Super League and the NRL, is one of 10 hard men that the panel must rank – with the others, in alphabetical order, being: Stuart Fielden, Thomas Leuluai, Barrie McDermott, Terry Newton, Malcolm Reilly, Kelvin Skerrett, Gorden Tallis, Ruben Wiki and Paul Wood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mention the rugby league Ashes, and it’s hard not to think of Adrian Morley, a brutal hit and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79561,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-79643","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rugby","8":"tag-rugby","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}