Laurie Daley once said that after two he was never the player he once was. Now consider Benji Marshall has had five shoulder reconstructions and will still line up for his 250th NRL match this weekend.

Let’s stop there. That introduction didn’t do Benji justice for the playmaker hasn’t just had five smashed shoulders since his debut in 2003. All of them came within four years of him coming into grade. In fact, it took a talking to from his family back in New Zealand to even get him to come back to Sydney and play on.

To be fair to Marshall, it’s a miracle he’s still playing and it’s amazing to think that after all those injuries he still came back to win the World Cup in 2008, a Golden Boot in 2010 and have the drive to try a code-switch in 2014.

”I thought a few times, ‘Geez, he might give up after this one’,” Wests Tigers then-assistant Royce Simmons told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2010.

”I saw him after the injuries on certain occasions sitting there with a tear in his eye thinking, ‘Here I go again’. For a split minute you think, ‘He’ll give up this time’.

“But a couple of hours later he’s back on [recovery]. All we did was keep encouraging him, the staff, because I think we admired him so much for making those comebacks.”

That’s guts.

But the style that made him the poster boy of the NRL and the idol of a generation is now the thing that hurts him most. Ten years ago, the flick passes, mesmerising sideways raids and chip kicks came off. Now, when the play goes bad, he’s the whipping boy of an army of frustrated St. George Illawarra supporters.

Age is playing its part too.

Yet here he is playing game 250 against the club that he put on the map.

Let’s not muck around here. Wests Tigers shouldn’t have won the premiership in 2005. Hell, they shouldn’t have made the finals. You’d be a liar if you said at the beginning of 2005 the joint-venture club was a chance of clinching the big one. A funny thing happened, though. Raw talent shocked fourteen other teams and a pack of cubs took the competition by storm. By October, everyone else were still shaking their heads and wondering what had just hit them.

Scott Prince was great, Brett Hodgson a warrior and their forwards toiled. The difference however was the brilliance of B. Marshall. He did things that season no player has been able to replicate since.

We can thank him that we now have Shaun Johnson and Roger Tuivasa-Sheck too.

The greatness of Marshall will be measured by what he did in the 2005 grand final against north Queensland so it’s easy to forget round one, 2006. In the first game of the season against the Dragons, Benji backed up his breakout ’05 season with a dominant performance and sealed the win with his trademark style, bamboozling defenders, sucking them in and getting a no-look pass away to his winger for the match-winning try.

Benji! Benji! Benji!

Then it all came undone.

“I despise the term ‘injury prone'”, he wrote in his autobiography.

“Only people who have been given that label know what it’s like.”

How many others though have gotten up as many times as him?

What player has had as many injuries and still found a way to conquer the world both in a team and as an individual?

Benji is the quintessential little guy who kept fighting back.

From touch football to the top of the rugby league world and around and around too many times to mention. And remember too that the spark in Benji gave New Zealand their momentum after years of torment. Stacey Jones was a great player and a legend in his own right but when Marshall came along, everything changed.

Rugby league was cool in New Zealand, Wests Tigers were the hottest ticket in town across the NRL and Benji shot to stardom faster than you can scream, “Benji’s done it again!”

No star has risen as quickly as his and while it feels like an eternity ago – Marshall is still here.

On Sunday, playing for the Dragons against his old club and mates, Benji runs out for the 250th in the National Rugby League.

He deserves 30,000 people at ANZ Stadium.

It’s so easy to forget.

Benji Marshall – rugby league’s modern day miracle.

@woodward_curtis

Video: Youtube