Roy Masters (rugby league)

Roy Masters is a former football coach during the 70's and 80's in the NSWRL competition. He is currently a sports columnist at the Sydney Morning Herald. He is also a member of the Australian Sports Commision and is known for his appreciation of both football and soccer. He was originally a school teacher with an interest in team psychology.

Football Coach

Masters began his career coaching at the Western Suburbs Magpies club in the 1978, unusually having no serious background as a player. He re-built the Magpies from the decline they suffered after the three successive losses to the St George Dragons in 61, 62 and 63 despite them having a better win-loss ratio that St George during that period. He coached the Magpies to a minor premiership in 1979 and they were consistently high quality during this period. Many quality players were produced under his tutelage including Les Boyd and Tommy Raudonikis. Masters left Wests when it emerged that the affiliated Leagues club at Ashfield would no longer be able to support the incomes of his key "fibros" players.

Masters moved onto St George in 1982, reaching the Grand Final in 1985 but lost. Masters is regarded as the finest coach to have never won a premiership continually helping financially struggling clubs to perform above their ability.

Masters was a master of psychology, famously terming the Western Suburbs, the "fibros" as opposed to the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles football club who he described as the "silvertails". This reflected both the socio-economics of the areas of Sydney and the financial situations of the clubs. He created this term after an exhibition match in Melbourne. The Sea-Eagles stayed at a luxury resort whilst Wests were at a two star hotel. Today Australian soccer commentaters refer to Chelsea as silvertails.

Sydney Morning Herald

Masters is a columnist at the Sydney Morning Herald who is known for his traditionalist attitudes to football. [1]

He has a keen ananlytical skill which he reguarly applies to the football and is genuinely highly regarded by current players, a rarity in an old-timer and/or a member of the media. [2]

He was against Super League when it broke out in 1995 and believes in the traditions of rugby league as opposed to the Murdoch promotional tools that have been applied within the game relatively unsuccessfully since the eighties.

He also covers boxing and a variety of other sports, famously criticising American jingoism that occurred in the 2002 opening ceremony at the Salt Lake city Winter Olympic Games.

Masters is a strong pusher of John O'Neill, the former Australian Rugby Union chief executive and now Australian soccer chief executive, reportedly because he gives Masters easy quotes for his newspaper columns.

Recently he has embarrassed soccer head Frank Lowy in a series of articles in which he detailed Australian soccer's financial volcano despite the relative success of the socceroos at the 2006 soccer world cup. Specifically he questioned whether Lowy, Australia's second richest man and an immigrant from Checkoslovakia, would repay an Australian Sport's commission loan of over 3 million dollars to help develop a national soccer league. Lowy replied in a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald among other things that Roy Masters was a "Rugby League commentater", a specific insult as Rugby League is considered football in Sydney. He further continued by insulting Master's journalistic credibility. He was made to look a fool by Masters, who revealed that his great uncle Jude Masters was a former Australian soccer captain, rightfully insinuating that he had more attachment than Lowy to Australian soccer. [3]

[4] A recent SMH article by Masters about long time friend and former player in Masters' Wests' teams