Gazman said:
... Manly in the 70's were the first club to really push the professional aspects of the game and had the financial muscle to rise to the top and attract the better players. ..
Not quite, Gazman.
Poker machines were legalised in NSW in 1956. By the late 1950s Wests were known as the millionaires due to their buying spree of big name star players in an attempt to win the premiership. But St George had become so rich by 1963 that their new leagues club was dubbed the Taj Mahal because of its opulence, and there was an 18 month waiting list for membership. Meanwhile, Souths were massively backed by the rich South Sydney Juniors Leagues Club.
Manly in the late 1960's and early 1970's certainly signed a number of big names, but it was not due to being the wealthiest club. It was more about canny management and offering players what they were worth, while their present clubs preferred to spend their profits elsewhere. There was no salary cap, some clubs were poor, but Manly certainly were not the wealthiest.
The Fibros v Silvertails was just a slogan invented by Roy Masters in the late 1970s to galvanise his no-name Wests team against the star-studded Sea Eagles. It related to the quality of playing roster, not the fact that Manly was rich and Wests were not. Wests had actually been 'silvertails' long before Manly, but poor management frittered their wealth away.
The word Silvertail does have a negative connotation: someone born to wealth rather than earning it the hard way. In football terms, all Manly players had earned it the hard way, but the club had a history of signing players who were already big name stars, so it was easy to just paint us as the rich plunderers of the poor.
Which was never true. The players came willingly to join a club that was committed to success, so they could fulfil their potential and have a shot at premierships. Most could have got similar or better money elsewhere.
After the signing of a few Souths players in the early '70s, then Norths, and then the Wests trio in 1980, our reputation was entrenched. With fans from those clubs green with jealousy, as well as others from Easts, Parra and Cronulla that we had defeated along the way, it was easy to find fans that had a grudge against the ultra-successful Sea Eagles. They lapped up the Silvertails angle, so it was always a popular cause for the media to highlight that history.
The big name signings slowed to the point that Ian Roberts in 1990 and maybe Terry Hill in about 1994 are the last big-name signings I can recall before our demise following Super League.
Everyone knows that since then we have battled financial hardship. We signed an aged Ben Kennedy and a promising young Kite, then Orford, and finally, at last, a genuine star in Jamie Lyon. Have we signed a single current rep player since then?
So the Silvertails moniker is no longer applicable? Hell no. It was never applicable in its literal sense, but we adopted it as an acknowledgement of the jealousy of rival fans, and as a reflection of the quality of our players and teams, our legacy of being accustomed to success, and of accepting nothing less. It refers not to economic domination but to rugby league excellence. It is a joke by our enemies that we have turned around to embrace for our own purposes. Silvertails forever!