Michael De Vere

Campbelltown product spent a year playing with Appin in the Group 6 competition before being graded with St George in 1995. The following year De Vere wrote to Brisbane coach Wayne Bennett requesting a trial. Bennett went one better, offering the young winger/centre an incentive contract. In 1998 De Vere scored the opening try in Brisbane’s 38-12 grand final win against C’bury. The club’s top point-scorer in 2000, De Vere made it two premierships in four seasons with the club when he landed three goals in the 14-6 grand final win against the Roosters in 2000. The following year he joined the ranks of two other Brisbane players (Terry Matterson and Chris Johns) to represent NSW in a State of Origin match. In 2003 De Vere was responsible for one of State of Origin’s more macabre images when NSW medical staff stapled a head gash while he was still on the field (the staple ‘gun’ got jammed on his head in front of over a million viewers). De Vere made his Test debut on the 2003 Kangaroo Tour and scored the try in the dying minutes of the Third Test of the Ashes series that saved the match. In 2004 he represented Australia in the ANZac Test but was dropped from the NSW team after the Blues’ narrow 9-8 win in the first match of the series. The leading point-scorer in the Broncos’ club history De Vere left the Broncos at the end of the season to take up a contract with English club Huddersfield.