Shepparton Bulls were on parade for a telling cause at the weekend.
Box Hill Rugby Club hosted the Tackling Leukaemia 10s pre-season tournament on Saturday and Moronae Silaga’s boys ruled the roost, winning the men’s competition.
The Bulls emerged like a colt out of the turnstiles, winning four games in pool play before crashing over top-ranked Melbourne side Endeavour Hills in the final.
The Bulls outscored Hills 19-5 in the final to land $2500 in prizemoney and earn top marks from Tackling Leukaemia president Kevin Moloney following the tournament’s second edition.
“They (Bulls) came down last year and went home empty-handed in the final,” Moloney said.
“But the Bulls came through and beat Endeavour Hills this year and, let me tell you, Endeavour Hills is probably the third top team in first division and are a very big, strong club out in the south eastern suburbs.
“So I was really pleased that they played terrific footy and won.”
A healthy cash cash prize and bragging rights are nice — but the roots beneath the Tackling Leukaemia 10s go much deeper than rugby.
Moloney was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2014 and was fortunate to receive a stem cell.
However, his close friend Peter Selby from Power House Rugby Club was not so lucky.
Selby, who was part Maori, died from the variation of blood cancer in 2020 after unsuccessfully gaining a stem cell match, sparking Moloney into action.
“We then did some investigation with two stalwarts of the Power House club and realised that members of the Maori, Pasifika and First Nations cohort are overrepresented with the disease, but grossly underrepresented on the Australia Bone Marrow Registry,” he said.
“Members of the Pasifika and Maori cohort might be tattooed to hell, but they’re sh*t scared of needles.”
From there, Moloney and co approached rugby clubs to chat about the prevalence of leukaemia within the Maori, Pasifika and First Nations cohorts.
Days later, they took mouth swabs and sent them off.
Opening an honest conversation about the disease has proved to be a game changer, with the unique targeting of rugby clubs resulting in a win for the registry.
“In the last two years we’ve achieved a 10 per cent increase of people on the Australian Bone Marrow Donor Registry year on year, so we’ve been fairly successful,” Moloney said.
“Last year we ran the Tackling Leukaemia tent and we got 150 volunteers, this year we only had 53, but that was because most of the teams had already been swabbed.
“However, the Australian Bone Marrow Donor Registry, who was in attendance, thought it was fantastic. We’ll hope to get another 100 from the clubs this year.”
Saturday’s run out also doubled as a ‘blooding’ session of sorts for the Bulls.
They were able to use the Tackling Leukaemia 10s as a chance to experiment with new combinations ahead of the Victorian Rugby Premiership’s return on April 27, turning plenty of heads in the process.
“I was absolutely tickled pink that the Bulls won it,” Moloney said.
“It’s a bloody fair effort to organise transport, come down by bus by 9am for the first game, be ready to play, play through a couple of rounds, throw the ball around as only Pasifikas can do.
“They played in the finals of the seniors, it was a tough game, but they won it. They played terrific football and I couldn’t be happier.”