Ashes, tears and power rise in a farewell to old Leichhardt

analysis On the last big day, Leichhardt Oval showed it's power one more time Tue 16 Jun 2026 at 1:18pm They let them on the field at the end and the true believers spilled down from the hill and onto the turf. Some people came prepared and brought footballs they could kick with their children. Others just fell to their knees and kissed the grass. One man poured out a little bit of the last beer he’d drink here before everything changed. Another scattered some of his father’s ashes. He’d done the same on the hill during the game, he explained through the tears. Leichhardt Oval had always been their place and now a part of them would be here forever. After a little while, everyone got shuffled off and they walked out into the night, choking the streets around the ground with writhing masses of humanity. Before long all that was left was the blaze of the floodlights, the cold bite of the wind that whipped off Iron Cove and a silence that hung heavy on the back of all the noise. It’s not goodbye, it’s just see you later. It’s an end and a beginning. Leichhardt is only going away for a year, to undergo a facelift that ensures its future as an NRL arena. It’ll be back, but it’ll change. It had to sacrifice a little piece of itself to survive, but survive it will. A broken-down palace You can live all kinds of lives on the Leichhardt Oval hill. It’s open to the public most weekdays now and when you have it all to yourself it’s a great place to be, just you and breeze blowing through the trees and the ghosts of all the times that have been had there. For junior grand finals and schoolboy matches it becomes a conduit between past and future, where the young try and dream their fate into reality. They have NSW Cup finals matches here once the weather starts to warm up. It’s a humbler experience than first grade but between the feel of the sun, the smell of the grass and wide open spaces offered by a smaller crowd, it’s got a relaxed appeal for more than just the footy sickos. There’s nothing relaxing about the NRL games here, though, and that’s the whole point, because they can dare you to believe in what’s possible for the brave and the faithful. It takes over the whole suburb and beyond, turning the streets into rivers of black, white and gold. At any other time the Orange Grove Hotel, the pub closest to the ground, is a standard back-street boozer but on game day it hums. Before the game it’s the perfect place to confidently assert that this is the game the Tigers are gonna turn it all around, I just know it. Afterwards, it’s a prime location to draft a text explaining to the boss that you won’t make it to work tomorrow. Everybody knows everybody, because if you’re going to Leichhardt that means you’re not a stranger. No matter how full it looks and how many patrons spill out onto the street there always seems to be just enough room for everyone. The best way to walk to the ground is through Callan Park, where the green offers respite from Sydney’s concrete jungles, although going right down Mary Street to meet it head on is a close second. There are enough cliches about Leichhardt and Sunday afternoon football and meat pies and beers on the hill and all the rest that it's a wonder it can rise above them, but it does. Late afternoon, specifically, is the best time for a game there – the sun setting through the clouds, casting them pink as they hang over the water makes it a little piece of heaven. In a very literal sense, the hill is not always a great place to watch football — the corners and the big screen can be hard to see amid the throng — but it is a magnificent place to be while football is being played. There are other hills at Brookvale, Kogarah, Wollongong, Cronulla and Campbelltown but Leichhardt dwarfs the lot. Sometimes bigger is better and sometimes size does matter. It’s a place where feelings are more important than facts, where many people truly become one. At the best times on the best days in recent years – like the golden point win over Cronulla or the Jahream Bula wonder try against the Cowboys last season — it's like stepping into a dream you've had your whole life, only to realise the dream is more real than your life. But the best spot in the ground for the discerning fan is not in the belly of the beast. It’s off to the side, at the Glover Street end. From there you can see the game head on – which is the thinking man’s way of watching footy – and have a good view of the big screen. You're right next to the hill, tucked close enough against it to feel its joy or sorrow and see the fans jump like dolphins or slump in despair. Looking at it is like looking at a flowing river – it’s always the same, it’s always different. There’s also a can bar there that, through some kind of beer-swilling magic, seems immune to the long lines that mark the rest of the ground. The critics love to talk about those long lines and the outdated facilities and how Leichhardt isn’t a patch on steel and concrete wonders like Parramatta Stadium or the new SFS. But they’re missing the point. Leichhardt’s flaws are not a weakness, but a strength. It’s what makes the ground gloriously archaic in a world increasingly bent on total optimisation. It’s why it remains raw and rugged and real in increasingly artificial times. We are in an age where people willingly hand over the process of living to thinking machines and rugby league will not be immune to this scourge. It makes protecting what is profoundly human all the more important. You could never build a ground like Leichhardt Oval from scratch. It is too full of life to be made anew. You could never invent its character, earned over the course of nearly a century since the first game there in 1934. What it has is too idiosyncratic and too lived in. It runs on memory, which is why it cannot be bought, sold or commodified, and that makes it priceless. It is a place that refuses to die or be swept away, refusing to bow to the future, saved time and again by the people who love it because they will not let go. There's not a fancy stadium in the world that inspires the same feeling. The spirit that fuels Leichhardt cannot be reconstructed because it grows through generations, passed down from the old to the young, and it can only exist within and between the people who go there. That feeling is rare among Australia’s football codes and it is powerful. That's why the ground is more popular now than ever. Every game there is now an event and tickets, even at exorbitant prices, sell quicker than cold beer in hell. All three matches there this season attracted crowds of over 17,000, marking the three highest crowds there since COVID, and the wild masses on the hill make games there a far more compelling television product. The corporate facilities might not be the best but when has rugby league ever been about making the suits happy anyway? Nobody’s ever scattered ashes in a corporate box. The last good time The precise atmosphere on game day can vary wildly as Tiger fortunes rise and fall. Through the hardest times it was all the Tigers fans had, which is just another way of saying they had each other. Against North Queensland in March, which doubled as the club’s season opener, the anticipation for the year and the eagerness for something resembling success was as easy to feel as the blazing sun. Six weeks later, after a thumping win over Canberra that put the club into third, there was a dark thrill and frenzied joy in the pain their team was able to inflict on last year's minor premiers. The Raiders have run up some big scores at Leichhardt over the years and the Tigers fans relished the vengeance like a child getting back at a schoolyard bully. Since that night the Tigers have lost five of six matches, the last of which was a humiliating 68-0 defeat to the Panthers that left their once-promising season skidding all over the road and threatening to tip right over. So, in a way, the NRL's farwell to old Leichhardt came at the perfect time. It gave the Tigers a chance to come home to themselves. Through the most desolate years the ground acted as an oasis in the desert for a fanbase so desperate to believe in something that even if it turned out to be a mirage they’d drink the sand. The most devout showed up hours before the game and were met with a late rush as punters piled in on a Socceroos high. The cold winds rose but the blood ran hot after Starford To'a's opening try. But Gold Coast is a team with just enough weapons to be dangerous. In Keano Kini and Jayden Campbell they have serious quicksilver, even if they don’t always know how to use it. After Kini set up three tries in what felt like 30 seconds, the muttering grew as dark as the grey skies. A downpour and a downfall seemed imminent. It did start to sprinkle at one point and unless you can afford a seat in one of the grandstands there's no escaping the elements. You're at the mercy of the skies and when it rains, you get wet. Days like that are for the truest believers, who endure it as a matter of pride and stay as a badge of honour. It was Jarome Luai, who has been so maligned since announcing his decision to head to Papua New Guinea, who brought the ground and the game back to life. Luai’s legacy as a Tiger will be defined these next 18 months. If he can lead them to the finals and end their lengthy September exile, he can head to PNG with the thanks of a grateful fanbase. If he doesn’t, he’s much closer to being just another big-money buy who couldn’t make it work. And the Tigers have had so, so many of those. He had to win them back a little and by the time he finished off his hat-trick with a stepping effort right through the heart of the Titans defence, the dreams felt a lot stronger than they did before. Given he will likely never play here as a Tiger again it was a nice personal farewell to a ground that suits him. He is the vibes king and the ground is a vibes temple. He's scored five tries in his 18 months at the Tigers and all of them have come at Leichhardt. After each score of the Tigers' comeback from 24-12 down to their 36-28 win it was Luai revving up the hill as he waited for the ensuing kick-off, demanding more noise, more passion, more fire and the people responded gladly, any Chiefs thoughts forgotten. Once it all finished, people began to say their goodbyes to the stadium and to one another. There was a pleasing sadness to it all, knowing it was the end of something beautiful. Above all, Leichhardt is a place people come to be together and while it’s away, something will be missing from the lives of those who take a piece of if with them in their hearts. The ground announcer pleaded with the fans not to steal seats, pointing out there was still NRLW games to be played there in the weeks to come. It was a reminder there will still be good days there before the change comes, even if they won’t be as charged as the NRL matches. The last big day is not truly the last day. Some parts of the ground won’t survive. The best spot in the stadium, nestled right next to the hill, won’t exist anymore because the new grandstand will swallow it up. The old plastic seats and wooden benches will be ripped out and there will be a new corporate lounge, mezzanine and grandstand bar in the western stand. The benches will be sorely lamented – there’s not a lot of them left across the NRL – but it’s among the changes that had to happen. With an increased capacity at the ground, more people will be able to share the feelings it inspires and taking that feeling and spreading it is important. A little part of the future will come to Leichhardt at last and that will ensure the ground will have a future at all, a future that can begin the day the Tigers return and settle into a Leichhardt that can last forever. The wait has now begun for the moment they throw the new gates open and everyone streams back in, telling each other how much they missed it and how glad they are to be back and running into football mates they haven’t seen in ages. The Orange Grove will do a roaring trade and the fella who sells hot dogs on Mary Street will get a few bucks for his trouble. The hill will transform and the pure joy of the return will be replaced once the game begins as it rumbles hungry like the beast because there will be everything to play for and forever to play it in. God willing, it’ll be an afternoon game on a bright and clear day, and at some point the sun will start to set behind the new grandstand on the first day of the rest of Leichhardt’s life. That’s when the shadows will grow long, but as long as you face the Sun they’ll be behind us. It will be a beginning as sure as Sunday was an end. [Image text:] WAYNE PEARCE HILL LEICHHARD OVAL WESTS TIGERS TITANS TRIES TRIES GOALS GOALS FLD GOALS FLD GOALS 1406 BAD POINTS POINTS 2026