Barry Muir

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**Barry Muir**
Personal information
Australian national rugby league captain
Full name	Barry Muir
Date of birth	18 Sept, 1937
Place of birth	Tweed Heads, NSW,
School(s)	Coolangatta State
Youth clubs
Years	Club
1952-1955	Tweed Heads Seagulls
Senior clubs*
Years	Club	Apps (points)
1956 & 1971 1957 1958–1968 1970	Tweed Heads Seagulls Toowoomba Valleys Wests Brisbane Ayr
Representative teams
1951 1959–1966 1929–1936	Qld Schoolboys Queensland Australia	24 (13) 25 (6)
Professional clubs coached
1966 –1968 1970 1971 1972 - 1974	Wests Brisbane Ayr Tweed Heads Seagulls Redcliffe
Representative teams coached
1974–1978	Queensland
* Professional club appearances and points counted for domestic first grade only.

Barry Muir (born 1937 in Tweed Heads, New South Wales) is a former Australian representative rugby league football player. He was a halfback for the Australian national team and for Queensland. He played in twenty-two Tests between 1959 and 1964, as captain on two occasions.

1 Club career
2 Representative career
3 Legacy
4 Representative matches played
5 Sources
6 Footnotes

[edit] Club career

Muir played his junior rugby league at Coolangatta State School and represented Queensland Schoolboys in 1951. He was graded with the Tweeds Heads Seagulls and made his first grade debut in 1956. He played a season in 1957 with Valleys in Toowoomba before joining Western Suburbs in 1958 in the Brisbane domestic competition. He stayed with the club for eleven seasons.

He was captain-coach of West Brisbane from 1966 to 1968, played 1970 as captain-coach with Ayr in North Queensland and finished his playing career as captain-coach in 1971 back at Tweed Heads where his career had begun fifteen seasons earlier.

[edit] Representative career

He debuted for Queensland against a visiting New Zealand team in 1959 and was selected in the Australia national rugby league team for the same series. He made his Test debut on June 13th 1959 at the Sydney Cricket Ground along with Reg Gasnier, Johnny Raper and Noel Kelly and played in all three Tests against the Kiwis. Later that year was selected for the 1959-60 Kangaroo tour where he appeared in all six Tests and fourteen minor Tour matches.

He was vice-captain of the Australian squad for the 1960 World Cup and played in all three Australian appearances. He first captained Australia in the opening match of that World Cup against France when Keith Barnes was out injured.

After captaining Queensland in 1961 in the interstate series he was selected in a 1961 tour of New Zealand and captained Australia in the Second Test of that series in Auckland to a 20-8 victory. For the next two years he formed a regular test halves partnership with Five-eighth Arthur Summons in a domestic Ashes series against Great Britain and Tests against visiting New Zealand and South African sides.

In 1963 he made his second Kangaroo tour and replicated his feat of four years prior in appearing in all six Tests and fourteen minor Tour matches. He was sent-off in the Third Test dead-rubber after Australia had dominated in the first two games.

[edit] Legacy

Muir was a long time outspoken critic of the system that allowed the best Queensland club players to move the Sydney competition and then to represent New South Wales. This widely-held sentiment eventually led to the birth of the Rugby League State of Origin concept.

Muir coached the Queensland side from 1974 to 1978 (two years prior to the adoption of Origin selection criteria) and during this time Muir coined the term "cockroaches", the derogatory descriptor of the New South Wales rugby league team still used by the Queenslanders.

In February 2008, Muir was named in the list of Australia's 100 Greatest Players (1908-2007) which was commissioned by the NRL and ARL to celebrate the code's centenary year in Australia.^[1]^[2]

[edit] Representative matches played

Team	Matches	Years
Queensland	24	1959-1966
Australia (Tests)	22	1959-1964
Australia (World Cup)	3	1960

[edit] Sources

Whiticker, Alan (2004) Captaining the Kangaroos, New Holland, Sydney
Andrews, Malcolm (2006) The ABC of Rugby League Austn Broadcasting Corpn, Sydney