As Alex Johnston approaches eternity, rugby league must brace itself

Source : ABC NEWS

As rugby league prepares for Alex Johnston to break the all-time try-scoring record, it’s clear the game doesn’t quite know how to react.

Johnston is one try shy of Ken Irvine’s record and will surpass the North Sydney legend in the coming weeks, possibly as soon as Friday night’s match against the Sydney Roosters.

It will mark a rare kind of history and put nearly all of us in undiscovered country. This is not like the all-time pointscoring record, which has fallen five times since 2000 alone, or the appearances record, which has been broken twice in the past 15 years.

Irvine retired in 1972, but first took the try-scoring record in 1969, when he surpassed Harold Horder’s career total of 152.

The game where he did it, a 26-18 loss to St George in round 20, is roughly as close to today as it was to the sinking of the Titanic. Rabbitohs coach Wayne Bennett, now the elder statesman of the sport at 75, was still a teenager.

Horder’s own mark had stood since his retirement in 1924, meaning that once Johnston crosses the line for the 213th time, the try-scoring record will change hands for just the second time in 102 years.

Nobody involved in the game, bar its eldest fans, has ever been a part of this before. There is no protocol to follow and little precedent to look towards.

We are all of us working this out as we go, so no wonder there’s a disconnect on whether there should be a pitch invasion when Johnston’s moment comes.

The man himself is in favour of it, as are most Rabbitohs fans. The outpouring of joy and the sense of history around Lance Franklin’s 1,000th AFL goal is the closest cross-sport comparison of recent times to what’s before Johnston now, and the desire to replicate those scenes is palpable. When a moment of forever is on offer, everyone wants a piece of it.

Bennett, the NRL and Sydney Football Stadium management, who will put on extra security on Friday night, have done their best to shut it down ever since Johnston started to draw close at the end of last season, citing safety concerns, and it’s easy to see why.

It would bring chaos and uncertainty, as an invasion, by definition, cannot be controlled.

The NRL will arrange a post-match presentation for Johnston when the record falls, and the Rabbitohs are already taking pre-orders on commemorative merchandise.

But in every Rabbitohs game between now and then, the game will grapple with the weight of the moment. What’s the right way to celebrate something that happens twice a century? Can it ever be too much? Can it ever be enough?

They’d want to get it right because none of us might have another chance at this. Johnston’s try-scoring journey will not end at 213 — he is under contract until the end of next season and has the chance to extend the record even further.

Just how far that goes is an open question, but the prospect of 250 career tries is within the realms of possibility. Even if he doesn’t make it that far, it could be a long while before he is run down.

The second-highest active try-scorer is Roosters veteran Daniel Tupou, who is fourth on the all-time ledger with 183. At 34, the Tricolours veteran is still an enormously effective player — he crossed for a career-high 21 tries in 2024 — and he’s contracted until the end of 2026.

But Tupou would need to play an extra two years beyond that, by which time he’d be 37, and go at roughly a try a game in that time to even get close to Johnston, let alone surpass him.

The next most prolific scorer among active players is Parramatta’s Josh Addo-Carr on 159, and in him, we see just how fine the margins become in the chase of such a record.

At 30, Addo-Carr is two months younger than Johnston and spent the majority of his career with a Melbourne side that was just as potent as Johnston’s Rabbitohs teams.

But Addo-Carr was a slightly later starter than Johnston — he became a consistent starter with the Storm at 21, while Johnston was putting up big numbers from his rookie season as a 19-year-old.

Addo-Carr has also played more representative football, which meant there were more absences from his club side, and while he’s still put up strong try-scoring totals with Canterbury and Parramatta, it hasn’t been at the same rate as his Storm days.

Transfer any one of those things — a later start, a change of clubs or more rep football — from Addo-Carr to Johnston and the gap between them could be much closer, but as it stands, the Parramatta man seems like he’ll run out of time.

James Tedesco (149) is the only other active player with more than 140 tries, so from here we go into serious long-range projection.

Newcastle’s Dominic Young (74), Melbourne’s Xavier Coates (79) and the Dolphins’ Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow (73), who are all 24 and in the prime of their careers, all fit the profile for a possible contender, even if they’re barely a third of the way towards Johnston.

An even longer shot, but a tantalising one all the same, is newly minted Warrior Alofiana Khan-Pereira.

The former Gold Coast winger is the same age as Young and Coates and was out of favour last year, but managing 53 tries in his first 54 NRL games is cause for notice, especially given the Titans struggled to be competitive in that time.

To track down Johnston, Khan-Pereira would have to stay around that pace for another decade, which might sound fanciful, but the same thing could have been said about Johnston’s chase of Irvine plenty of times during the former’s career.

What this speculation shows is that Johnston could well hold the record for as long as Irvine did, with try-scoring mark the one longevity-based record that seems immune to the modern realities of the sport.

Careers now go longer than ever before and improvements in sports science mean athletic primes can now stretch well into a player’s 30s.

There’s an extended regular season, new clubs joining the league, and more games to play, and attack is far more structured, which means it’s more repeatable, so there are more tries to be scored and more opportunities to score them than ever before.

But just because they can be is no guarantee they will be. Rugby league history is full of players who were on track to break Irvine’s record before fate or their own choices took them on another path.

Johnston has stayed the course ever since his first game and first try back in 2014, and on all the days from this day back to that, a thousand things had to go right for this to happen, and the miracle here is all of them did.

If the Rabbitohs recall Nathan Merritt for a few more games in that first season, if Johnston decides to chase the fullback dream at another club, which he came very close to doing more than once, and if the Rabbitohs have just a few years in the competition doldrums during Johnston’s athletic prime, then he doesn’t have the hot start he needed to build the foundation of his total.

It continued through the middle of his career — if the NRL doesn’t tweak the rules of the game during COVID to balloon point-scoring totals and if Souths aren’t perfectly built to take advantage of those changes, if Cody Walker doesn’t arrive at Souths when he does and go on to be one of the great late bloomers the sport has ever known, then Johnston doesn’t maintain the pace.

The four-year period from 2020 to 2023, where he scored 105 tries in 92 games, including back-to-back 30-try seasons in 2021 and 2022 at the height of the NRL’s set restart gluttony, is what made his chance at the record a reality. 

Only eight current players across the rest of the NRL have scored more tries in their entire careers than Johnston managed in those four years alone. 

It was a scoring bacchanal that was not sustainable and since then, the going has been slower, but if Johnston doesn’t rebound from the Achilles injury he suffered in 2024, if he doesn’t play well enough to earn his most recent contract extension and firmly put the record in his sights and if a thousand other little things go in a slightly different way, then we wouldn’t be here with Johnston on the cusp of breaking one of rugby league’s oldest and most important records.

The arc of history bent towards Johnston, so it’s not that 213 is a lucky number — it’s proof that as forever is about to happen, he’s beaten some very long odds to start his watch at the top of the charts. 

That watch could last the rest of our lives as Johnston reaps his ultimate reward, living in history as flesh and blood among the ghosts of the past.