Then he spoke to his father.

"Every game you play each week, you play for yourself," dad Wayne said to him from his home in Brisbane. "Play this one for me."

That conversation last week inspired the Kiwi prop to make a shock start for the Roosters in their traditional Anzac Day clash against the Dragons.

Having been ruled out for six matches after the clash with Melbourne last Saturday, Waerea-Hargreaves ended up starting, almost like nothing had happened.

It was the type of dogfight he would relish, that would do his family proud. He was in the thick of most arguments, but that's nothing new. The Dragons won 14-12, but the result was rightfully secondary to the occasion.

Anzac Day is supposed to be about solemn reflection. In rugby league terms, however, it developed into an afternoon of high drama as apocalyptic clouds came over the stadium with 13 minutes left  in the first half.

Then came the hail. Then fans and players alike fled the scene and play was temporarily abandoned.  We won't forget this one in a hurry. In the context of the game, it was massive. In the contest of what we had honoured earlier in the day, it meant little.

When Waerea-Hargreaves and his teammates visited the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park on Friday, I asked him if he was playing.  He laughed. He was adamant he would not be.  It was a smokescreen, bless him. A series of fitness tests earlier that day had cleared him to play.

The desperation to take the field had nothing to do with rep jumpers or the next contract. For a change, it had very little to do with his Roosters jumper. "It's the biggest game of the year for me," he said. "I play for everyone else in my family."

One of them is his father, who spent a large part of his life helping the US military and United Nations in war zones that include Somalia, Kosovo, Cambodia and Iraq. The other is his cousin Jared Purcell, who doesn't just share the prop's first name but also his hulking frame.

Purcell, 27, stood silent among a sprawling crowd at the dawn service at Coogee Beach hours before the match. Medals polished the night before were easily made out in the early morning darkness. On his right breast, he wore the medals of his late grandfather Ted, who had served in Papua New Guinea as a carpenter after the Second World War.

On the left breast over his heart, Purcell wore the medals he had received for service to the 2RAR – the Second Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment – during peacekeeping operations in East Timor in 2009 and then part of the mentoring taskforce in Afghanistan in 2012. "Afghanistan was a pretty heavy trip," Purcell said. "We were mentoring the Afghan National Army. We lost two guys from my battalion, then two guys who were attachments."

Purcell left the army in 2012, and he's only  had limited opportunity to watch his cousin play in the traditional Anzac Day match since, having more recently worked in security at the detention centres in Nauru.

He travelled from Brisbane in anticipation of Waerea-Hargreaves playing. "It's a bit of a bummer he won't be playing, but that's life," he said after the dawn service.

Then one of his mates who had travelled with him from Brisbane chimed in with the late mail: "I've heard he's going to play."

The seats of Allianz Stadium are a long way from the rugged terrain of the Miribad Valley in Afghanistan, where Purcell stood in the observation post overlooking Fort Operating Base Wali. Even that far away, his thoughts were often of home and family and footy. And the Chooks.

"That's where I unfurled the Roosters flag," Purcell grins. "We tried our best to keep up with the scores. The reception in Afghanistan varies. You've got people who are paper-pushers who stay in Tarin Kowt. Those in infantry and cavalry, and the engineers, we get sent into the valleys and mountains. Sometimes we'd be out on patrol for six weeks, so we'd ring home when we could and family would fill you in about where we were on the ladder. Everyone is mad about footy. Everyone takes their jerseys over. It's good fun."

Amid the rain and the hail and the lightning in this match, there was much fun to be had. In the last 10 minutes, the result was in the balance. Yet the final score, as always, didn't matter.

Both Jareds can explain why.

In the lead-up to the game, Roosters coach Trent Robinson asked his players to explain what the Anzac Day fixture meant to them. Waerea-Hargreaves could barely get his words out. It meant that much to play. It would've meant more not to.