DID YOU see the celebrations that followed South Sydney Rabbitohs winger Alex Johnston’s 213rd career try when his side faced the Roosters at Allianz Stadium in the second round of this season’s NRL fixtures?
If you did, I’m sure you will have enjoyed what you saw.
And it happened on Friday the 13th of March, which is supposed to be an unlucky day but certainly wasn’t for Alex, who began the game on 211 tries, one behind the legendary Ken Irvine’s career total of 212, which was the highest total of tries ever scored by any player in the Australian competition. He needed two tries to break the record and he got them both.
His second try came in the first minute of the second half and, despite warnings not to invade the pitch and the possibility of being fined $5,500 for doing so, large numbers of spectators, including Anthony Albanese, the current Prime Minister of Australia, ignored that and ran onto the pitch to congratulate Johnston.
It was an amazing and memorable moment for Johnston, for rugby league, and Australian sport generally.
It was reminiscent of the pitch invasion four years earlier at the Sydney Cricket Ground, when AFL star Buddy Franklin kicked his 1,000th AFL goal.
What was particularly notable was that in all the chaotic scenes there wasn’t a single person injured as all the fans went back to their seats. There was no animosity whatsoever between the Rabbitohs and Roosters supporters. Both sets of fans just seemed to be delighted to have witnessed a truly historic moment for the game.
Can you imagine a similar thing happening in football in England, for example. I suspect many fans of the competing clubs would be targeting each other.
Afterwards there were some sour reactions to Albanese running on the pitch, with some commentators claiming that he was trying to take the spotlight away from Johnston, although that seemed a ridiculous criticism to me.
The truth is that Albanese didn’t take away any of the attention that was deservedly focused on Johnston. The fact that the Prime Minister ran onto the pitch was actually a very positive thing for rugby league in Australia. Can anyone imagine Sir Keir Starmer running onto the field at an English rugby league match?
The one thing that relieved me about that try was that the Bunker played no part in it.
Can you imagine if there had been some doubt about the validity of the try and it had been taken up by the Bunker and disallowed? How much of an anti-climax would that have been? And how would the fans have reacted?
In 1969 Ken Irvine passed the previous record of 152 tries that had been scored by Harold Horder for South Sydney and North Sydney between 1912 and 1924. He went on to play four more years, retiring in 1973 and extending Horder’s record by another 60 tries.
That makes me wonder how much further Alex Johnston can take the record and whether any other player will ever get near to his total.
It also set me thinking about the previous record holders Horder and Irvine, who both deserve tributes for having led the way in creating try scoring records.
Harold Horder was regarded as one of the greatest wingers to have played the game.
According to Wikipedia, in his first game for South Sydney he stepped and swerved through the entire Glebe team in a 90-metre dash to score one of the greatest individual tries in rugby league history.
What a shame that his try wasn’t recorded by the technology of that time.
Horder also scored 84 tries for representative teams during his long playing career, including eleven for Australia in 13 Test matches between 1913 and 1924.
He was inducted into the Australian Rugby League Hall of Fame on 7th September 2004 at the Dally M Awards in Sydney.
There is significantly more TV coverage of Irvine’s career, which can be viewed on YouTube.
He was a remarkable athlete, setting the world professional sprint record for 100 yards in 1963 with a time of 9.3 seconds at Dubbo. That time came very close to that of Bob Hayes, the great American sprinter who won the 100 metres gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964.
He also scored 70 tries in representative games, including 33 for Australia between 1959 and 1967. Sadly he died of leukaemia in 1990 at the age of 50.
Irvine was also inducted into the Australian Rugby League Hall of Fame in 2004 and in 2018 the award for the NRL’s top try scorer for the season was named the Ken Irvine Medal.
Alex Johnston is 31 years of age and still has plenty of time left in the game. As a PNG international he is adored in that country and he has made it clear he would like to play for the new PNG Chiefs team when it enters the NRL in 2028. I hope his wish is fulfilled.
And here is a remarkably coincidental statistic.
The game in which Ken Irvine broke the record in 1969 was a 26-18 loss to St George and Irvine scored two tries.
The game in which Alex Johnston broke the record in 2026 was a 26-18 loss to Sydney Roosters and Johnston scored two tries.
Maybe there is a higher power at work!
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 519 (April 2026)