A young star in a famous Bulldogs side in the 1980s, Paul Langmack had so much enthusiasm, he spent his summer between premierships in the UK playing an extra season.
On the back of winning the 1984 premiership the Bulldogs were booming. Two thirds of the club’s season tickets had been sold a month before the opening round and confidence was high throughout Canterbury-Bankstown.
But coach Warren Ryan’s preseason that year was anything but straightforward.
Steve Folkes, Peter Tunks, Mark Budgen, Jim Leis, Phil Gould and Geoff Robinson were all injured or ill over summer and didn’t train, while young guns Paul Langmack, Kevin Moore and Michael Hagan decided to head to the UK to jam a Super League season in between two NSWRL campaigns.
“The Bulldogs used to always have the best end of season trips away,” Langmack told Big League.
“I got to the club in ‘83 and they’d just got back from South Africa the year before. In ‘84, Peter Moore said we weren’t going on a trip away unless we made the grand final and I wasn’t sure if we were going to make it.
“So halfway through the year, I said to Michael Hagan, why don’t we go over and play in England and that’s what we did.
“From the start of the 1984 season until after the 1985 grand final, I played a game every single week, including on Boxing Day and New Years Day over in the UK.”
Langmack admitted he got pretty lucky in the early stages of his career. After captaining the Australian Schoolboys in 1982, Langmack joined a star studded Bulldogs outfit and became the youngest player to play 100 first grade matches, by the age of 22.
“In my first six years out of school, I played in four first grade grand finals. I was pretty lucky to come into a club as strong as Canterbury.
“Clubs that talk about culture, never seem to have any. It’s the senior players that need to set the standard and at the Bulldogs when I arrived, the senior players were the fittest and trained the hardest, so the younger players had to try and match that or they’d get left behind.”
On top of that, the ‘Dogs of War’ were also mentored by one of rugby league’s greatest coaches.
“Warren Ryan was that good of a coach that they had to change the rules to beat us,” Langmack said.
“In ‘85, they added the in-goal rule and then changed the offside line from five metres to 10 metres because no side could beat us.”
“Warren just had an incredible amount of knowledge and he taught us how to play football. Coaches these days talk all about processes but they don’t teach players to tackle. No one tackles properly any more and that’s why we see head clashes and hip drops and things like that.
“We just had a great bunch of blokes who complimented each other. We were tough, we trained hard and we played smart, because we listened and followed the way Warren wanted us to play and that’s why we won two grand finals.”
