Parramatta coach Jason Ryles helped pull a woman from a burning car late on Thursday night – then had local police poke fun at him for throwing his walkie-talkie in anger during the loss to South Sydney just a few hours earlier.
Ryles was driving home along Mount Ousley Road just after midnight when he noticed smoke coming from a car that had flipped onto its side.
“We were coming down Mount Ousley and turned off on to New Mount Pleasant Road, and there was a car on its side with smoke coming out of it,” Ryles said.
“As we got closer I noticed there was a girl standing inside the car on its side. I thought to myself, ‘This could be trouble here’.
“I parked the car down the road so my kids couldn’t see what was happening, just in case [there was another person trapped].
“There was a guy already there. He smashed the back window with a Yeti [drink] bottle, then I grabbed the girl out of the car.
“It happened pretty quickly. Three minutes later, the car was fully alight. The girl was fine. She would have been in her 20s and on her way home from work. She was just in shock.
“I won’t lie, I shit myself, and it was pretty scary. But you do what anyone else would do and see if you can help. Before you know it, you’ve got your head in a car. The other fella did most of the work. He cut his hand. I was probably more suited to getting the girl out because of the size of me.”
Ryles drove home most of the way stewing about the 32-12 loss to South Sydney, during which he was caught on camera losing his cool in the coaches’ box.
The coach was so disappointed after the match that he said his side would have been flat out beating a “park football side”.
“I probably don’t have the vocabulary to articulate how I actually feel, so disappointing is probably one way to put it,” Ryles said at his post-match press conference.
The frightening late-night scenes quickly snapped him out of his mood.
“It absolutely squared me up,” Ryles said. “I went from thinking about a footy game to me thinking, ‘If we didn’t get here in time, this girl could have been in all sorts of trouble’.
“We waited around for the fire to get put out, then the police came over and talked about the game. They gave me a bit of stick about what happened in the box.”
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