Rugby Reloaded 210: Jonty Parkin: the man who invented the modern scrum-half

In this episode I'm joined by Lee Robinson to talk about his new book 'Jonty: The Life of Jonathan Parkin', arguably the greatest rugby league scrum-half of all time.

Jonty's career began as a teenager with Wakefield Trinity before World War One and ended in 1932, by which time he had become the first player ever to tour Down Under three times, twice as captain, and had played in every international match in which he could be selected before his international retirement in 1930.

He did all this during what was arguably Trinity's poorest ever decade. Perhaps most importantly, Jonty was the archetype of the typical scrum-half - combative, tricky and with an inbuilt hostility to authority - and his influence is till felt today.

The book is available from https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/136704396053 and you can discover a whole lot more about Wakefield Trinity's history  at https://www.trinityheritage.co.uk

Rugby Reloaded 209 - Did Scotland Invent Soccer?

This week's episode looks at how soccer emerged in Scotland in the mid-1800s. By the early 1880s not only was Glasgow the world capital of football, but Scottish players playing for English clubs had revolutionised sport south of the Border. But is it the case that the Scots actually invented modern soccer?

In fact, the truth is more complicated than that - the study of Scottish football is an object lesson in the importance of taking comparative approach to the development of the football codes and understanding the wider social context of soccer’s rise to globalism.

Simple explanations underplay the complexities of how sports develop and the contributions made by working-class people to the transformation of a plaything of the privileged into the passion of the people.

Links to books and websites mentioned in the show:

John Hutchinson and Andy Mitchell ‘1824 The World’s Oldest Football Club’: https://www.scottishsporthistory.com/worlds-first-foot-ball-club.html

Richard McBrearty ‘Glasgow Before The Explosion … football cultures in the city prior to 1873’: https://scottishfootballorigins.org/2021/08/26/glasgow-before-the-explosion-the-role-of-migration-and-immigration-in-the-development-of-football-cultures-in-the-city-prior-to-1873/

Matthew McDowell ‘A cultural history of association football in Scotland 1865-1902’: https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/a-cultural-history-of-association-football-in-scotland-1865-1902-/

Rugby Reloaded 208 - Liam O'Callaghan on his history of Irish Rugby Union

This week we talk to Dr Liam O’Callaghan about the newly published paperback edition of his superb history of rugby in Ireland ‘Blood and Thunder’.

It’s a classic work which looks at the history of the sport in the context of Irish history over the past 150 years.

As well as detailing the history of the sport itself, it also examines the relationship of the game to the complex political history of Ireland and explains how the sport has remained united on a disunited island.

It’s a superb book that is the latest landmark work from a series of high quality works about the history of sport in Ireland. It’s published by Penguin and you can find more details on their website.

Rugby Reloaded 207 - What the hell is going on in British rugby league?

In this episode I'm going to try to give a historian's answer to the question that every rugby league fan is asking today: just what the hell is wrong with British rugby league?!

It’s no accident that England's style of play in the Ashes series also looked like a metaphor for the state of the game off the pitch: unimaginative, out of date, and committed to repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

The simple truth is that no-one in the leadership of the game has any answers. In fact, they aren’t even asking the right questions.

You can see this in last season's debate about whether Super League should have 12 or 14 teams. The question is of how many teams should be in Super League is a minor one - throughout the history of the game the number of clubs in the top tier has actually changed two or three times every decade. The real issues confronting the sport revolve around historic structural problems that British rugby league has never addressed.

The first of those problems is how to attract spectators in the post-industrial north of England, which, whether we like it or not, is the heart too the game. The second is how to increase the number of players at all levels in a 21st Century world of streaming, video games, shortened attention spans and the overwhelming juggernaut of soccer.

So today I'm going to take the long historical view and look at how the failure to deal with these longstanding problems has landed the sport in its current predicament...

To start, let's take a quick look at the geography of professional rugby league to see both its strength and weakness.

The heartland of rugby league is Northern England. The North's population is 15.5 million people, larger than Scotland, Wales and the whole island of Ireland combined. If the North was an independent nation, it would be the tenth biggest economy in Europe. This is a significant market that has never been fully exploited by the game.

But of course this isn't the whole picture. Much of the north has never recovered from the deindustrialisation of the late twentieth century,  especially the loss of the mines, docks and factories which were the backbone of rugby league. Four of the poorest regions in Europe are in the North, and rugby league is disproportionately represented in the poorest areas of the region.

It's a tough environment, but the strategy of the RFL and most of the clubs has simply been to squeeze more revenue out of its existing financially-challenged supporters. Loop fixtures, Magic Weekend, and the 1895 Cup do not bring in new supporters nor attract new sponsors, but simply add to the cost of being a fan.

Because there is no strategy to increase its revenue base, the game cannibalises itself. Perhaps the worst example of this is the fact that Catalans and Toulouse pay the travel costs of English clubs when they go to France. And the absurd debate about which teams bring the most away fans is another unedifying example of the idea that someone else - French clubs, Sky TV, away fans, you name it - will subsidise the clubs.

This attitude isn't new. In the days before the TV revolution of the 1960s, clubs just expected supporters to roll up in their thousands - after all, what else was there to do on a Saturday afternoon? As with soccer, this led to a neglect of stadiums that almost bankrupted the game in the 1980s and 1990s.

Even in the 1970s, clubs were already relying on TV contract money from the BBC. The advent of satellite TV in the 1990s and the huge sums paid by broadcasters to televise the game became a life-support system that absolved clubs of their responsibility to grow their supporter bases.

So, in thirty years of Super League, average crowds have topped 10,000 spectators per match in only five seasons. Given that one of the promises of the Super League revolution was that it would bring new fans into the game, this has clearly not been a success.

But now, as the era of traditional TV broadcasting draws to a close and broadcasters are paying less for sports rights, we can see the crucial financial importance of a growing fan-base.

There are no easy answers to this problem, but the first step should be to set a minimum standard that a Super League club has to average at least 10,000 spectators per home match (or sells out every match if they're in a smaller stadium). If you can't get 10,000 people in your own town to watch their local club, you're simply not doing your job properly.

The same goes for participation. There are approximately 65,000 men and women playing rugby league regularly in England. This figure has been remained constant thanks to the growth of women's rugby league, which accounts for over 5,000 adult participants, and hides a decline in men's participation. As anyone in the community game will tell you, times are tough for men's amateur clubs.

What are the professional clubs doing to increase player numbers? Very little in most cases. Yet they have a fantastic resource of over two dozen full-time professional players who only spend a proportion of their day training. What better way to introduce schools and young people to the game than for these players to be used in regular coaching sessions in schools and to support inter-school tournaments?

It's worth noting here that one of the crucial reasons for rugby league becoming the dominant game in Sydney before World War One was because it quickly built deep roots in the schools.

New player development pathways need to be developed because the game has failed to deal with two other structural problems affecting player recruitment. The first is obvious. Since rugby union went professional in 1995 the flow of top Welsh players into our game has stopped. This has weakened the national team, reduced awareness of league in Wales, and removed the glamour that was historically provided by such great Welsh stars as Billy Boston and Jonathan Davies.

But less obvious is what might be called the 'Ryan Giggs Syndrome'. Son of the great Swinton scrum-half Danny Wilson, Giggs was a schoolboy rugby league player - his first appearance on the Old Trafford pitch was as a ballboy for the first Ashes test of 1986 - but the money on offer from soccer was too lucrative for him to turn down. Sadly, the same story has repeated itself countless times over the last three decades - most recently with the signing of Jermaine McGilveray's son Isaac by Chelsea.

Soccer has grown much bigger and stronger since the Giggs era but our game has not recognised the way the round ball game is undermining rugby league's appeal. One way to do that is, again, to increase the sport's presence in schools.

And that also means that the public image of the game needs to be radically rethought to appeal to young people. What kind of message is being sent out when Nigel Wood has a higher media profile than Mikey Lewis?

Which brings us to the core problem confronting the game. The fundamental roadblock to developing a long-term strategy for the sport is that the clubs control all the levers of power, and that their short-term self-interest always outweighs the overall interests of the sport as a whole.

If someone was to take over the sport, the first order of business for the new leadership must be to end the power of the clubs, and enforce the authority of a completely independent governing body.

But that's only the beginning of wisdom. What do you do when you have control? The never-ending restructuring the game is a symptom of the fact that no-one has a clear strategy for the future of the game.

They've tried copying from other sports. But using the rugby union world cup as the model for the 2021 rugby league world cup was a failure, because league fans are not like union fans. They've tried bringing in IMG to advise them - but IMG are not used to dealing with anything outside of the mainstream sports world. They even tried Eddie Hearn, who hates rugby league!

The simple truth is that rugby league is not like other sports. For deep historical and cultural reasons, some of which are beyond control of the game, it has been an outsider sport, whether it likes it or not.

This unique situation has forced it to be innovative, daring and welcoming, but also parochial, short-sighted and lacking in ambition. The key to success is to highlight the positive qualities which make it unique. Follow the example of basketball's NBA, which became one of the world's most recognisable brands in the 1980s and 1990s by embracing its roots in urban, youth street culture.

So what should rugby league do next? Well, let’s keep it simple and have four  initial aims. 1. All Super League clubs have to average 10,000 spectators per match. 2. Every club has to establish teams and a tournament in schools in their immediate area.  3. Annual internationals to be played against Australia or New Zealand, alongside the rest of the growing world of rugby league. And 4, most importantly, the sport needs a leadership completely independent and free of all club links.

It's not rocket science. But this is, of course, rugby league, a sport which is living proof of the old saying that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it…

Rugby Reloaded 206 - The Oldham Rugby League Hall of Fame documentary

Harry Varley, the great Oldham half-back of the pre-1895 era.

This week we sit down with Kevin Fitzpatrick, a member of the Oldham Rugby League Heritage Trust, to talk about his documentary on Oldham's Hall of Fame.

It's a fascinating look at the history of the club and the town since the club was a founding member of the Northern Union in 1895, told through the individual stories of the players inducted into the club;s Hall of Fame.

Kevin talks about the history of the club, the ins and outs of making the documentary, and the Heritage Trust’s plans to celebrate Oldham's 150th anniversary next year.

You can buy the documentary via download from https://oldhamhalloffame.bandcamp.com/album/the-oldham-rugby-league-hall-of-fame or on CD from orlheritagetrust@gmail.com.

To find out more about the Oldham Rugby League Heritage Trust, check out the Trust’s website and its fascinating YouTube channel.

Rugby Reloaded 205 - The Global Spread of Football with Thomas Adam

This week we delve deep into the origins of the football codes across Britain, Europe and the Americas with Thomas Adam, author of the new book The Global Spread of football from the 1860s to the 1880s.

Thomas is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Arkansas and an authority on how culture is transferred between different nations, and of course, football is a prime example of this - although as we discuss, this is not so straight forward as it may at first appear.

The book looks at the emergence of football in England, Germany, Argentina and the United States in the 1860s and 1870s, and looks at the decisive influence of education and educators in the rise of the game. The book is code-agnostic, and so looks at ‘football’ as nineteenth century observers did: one game with many different ways to play. Along the way we also discuss the roads not taken, such as how Germany could have become a rugby nation and the US a soccer bastion.

For more details about the book and how to buy it, click here.

Rugby Reloaded 204 - A Cultural History of the Rugby League Ashes (part two)

With the Ashes series imminent, part two of Rugby Reloaded's look at the cultural history of Anglo-Australian rugby league moves onto the post-World War 2 period.

It was an era when the balance of power moved down under, with British players moving to Aussie clubs in the 1960s and 1970s, and the decline of Britain's ability to consistently compete with Australia in test matches.

After 1970, the Lions never won a test series and British efforts to compete were hampered by changes in the British sports economy and poor leadership. But as we look toward the upcoming Ashes series, is there a way forward?

Rugby Reloaded 203 - The Boston Game and the origins (and myths ) of football in the USA

Our new episode investigates the origin story of football in America, in conversation with Mike Cronin and Kevin Marston, authors of 'Inventing the Boston Game: Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth'.

It's a tale of early football, elite myth-making, and the creation of a tradition that was claimed by both gridiron and soccer.

As the book explains, what began as the youthful memories of a group of Boston Brahmins continues today as a culture war between the two eleven-a-side versions of football.

To find out more about the book, click on this link.

Rugby Reloaded 202 - A Cultural History of the Rugby League Ashes (part one)

As the countdown for the Rugby League Ashes begins, the new 'Rugby Reloaded' is the first of two episodes taking a deep dive into the cultural history of the Ashes to ask what it can tell us about Anglo-Australian relations over the past century.

There was time that the Ashes was seen seen as two 'British' nations fighting for rugby supremacy and when the sheer ferocity of matches reflected the underlying tensions between the 'Mother Country' and the upstart Dominion.

Even in the 1950s, Australian rugby league officials were telling RFL officials that they were just a British as them!

Rugby Reloaded 201 - David Goldblatt on 'Injury Time'

On this week's episode I talk to David Goldblatt about his new book 'Injury Time: Football in a State of Emergency' published this month by Mudlark.

It's a look at English soccer over past decade, examining its response to Brexit, Covid and climate change, and looking at the rise of the women's game and the changing role of the sport in society.

In our wide-ranging discussion, we talk about how football has become the new soap opera, the impact of social media, differences between the men's and women's game, and what the future holds for the game.

If you want to find out more, get your copy of 'Injury Time' from the publisher at harpercollins.co.uk/products/injury…=55169175650683

Rugby Reloaded 200 - Inside Rugby Union's Concussion Crisis

Today's episode is an edited version of a talk about rugby union's concussion crisis which I gave to the North of England Medico-Legal Society in Newcastle in April 2025, for which I'd like to thank Alex Littlefair for inviting me.

It looks at the history of concussion in men’s rugby union, examines how it has changed over the past fifty years, investigates the impact of professionalism, and looks at the weight of cultural traditions which have held back the sport’s ability to deal with the crisis confronting it.

As well as looking at the evolution of its attitudes to concussion, I also look at how rugby union’s hyper-masculine traditions - inherited from its founders in the mid-nineteenth century - have shaped its understanding of injuries and have remained essentially unchanged over almost two centuries.

Perhaps we can find the roots of the problem not only in today’s hyper-professional sport but also in its roots as the symbol of nineteenth-century manhood?

Rugby Reloaded 199 - Nan Halafihi, the Tongan Trailblazer

This episode talks to Dr Nick Halafihi about the life and career of his father, Nanumi (Nan) Halafihi, the first Tongan to play at Wembley and the first-ever Tongan to play professional rugby league.

This is a fascinating story of how Nan travelled with his brother Sione, a world-ranked cruiserweight boxer, and family friend Sam Felatu, and made a home in the north of England. He began his career with Doncaster in 1958 and then moved to Roy Francis’s Hull, where he established himself as attacking left-centre and played in the 1960 Challenge Cup final at Wembley.

This is a story of much more than rugby talent - it’s a tale of crossing hemispheres and cultures, of the warm welcomes he received but also of the racism he and his family faced. Most of all, it’s about someone whose career who paved the way for hundreds of other Tongan rugby players who would follow the path laid down by Nan Halifihi.

(photo courtesy of the Halifihi family)

Rugby Reloaded 198 - France's expulsion from the Five Nations (part 2)

In ‘Rugby Reloaded’ 196 we saw how France was expelled from the Five Nations in 1931 and banned from playing national and club teams in Britain and Ireland in the 1930s. This episode examines how they returned to the Five Nations after World War Two and the difficulties they still faced from rugby union’s International Board.

Almost immediately on their return in 1947, France found itself under suspicion, not least because French union clubs had signed dozens of rugby league players since the end of the war. Most notoriously, former international rugby league star Jean Dauger (right, with the ball)), was even selected for the French national rugby union side in 1953!

But eventually, the tensions declined thanks to a fear that another expulsion from the Five Nations would strengthen rugby league and because of the diplomatic skills of the leaders of French union.

Rugby Reloaded 197 - Harry Jepson: A Life in League

After something of a hiatus, ‘Rugby Reloaded’ is back with a special Super Deluxe featuring an in-depth interview with Harry Jepson (1920-2016) about his life and times.

Born and raised in the rugby league hotbed of Hunslet, Harry became a teacher and a rugby league administrator with Hunslet and Leeds, and his career in the sport stretched from organising school matches to helping to manage the Paris St Germain club at the start of Super League.

In between he was present at many historic moments of the game (including meeting Jean Galia and being at the All-Leeds Championship Final in 1938) all the way into the 21st Century.

Over 100 minutes, the interview tracks Harry’s life from childhood to statesman of the game, and is as much a memoir of sport as it is a social history of the north.

Rugby Reloaded 196 - 1931: When France Was Expelled From the Five Nations

The Rugby Union World Cup has kicked off in France this week, so this episode of 'Rugby Reloaded' goes back in time to look at when France was expelled from the international game in 1931. Not only was France kicked out of the Five Nations but its clubs were banned from playing British teams.

We look at how and why this happened, and explore how deep-rooted British suspicions of the French led to rugby union's greatest crisis since 1895.

The fateful match: France versus Wales 1930 (Credit: WRU)

Rugby Reloaded 195 - Rugby League in Thatcher's Britain with Anthony Broxton

Rugby Reloaded kicks off a brand new series and we kick-off with a blockbuster interview with Anthony Broxton about his new book Hope and Glory: Rugby League in Thatcher’s Britain.

Anthony’s book explores the history of the sport during a pivotal decade for Britain. It was the era of Hanley and Offiah, when the pro game expanded as far as Kent, but it was also the decade of the miner’s great strike and social devastation across the sport’s heartlands. We talk about these topics and much more, and ask what can learn from the 1980s.

You can follow Anthony on the social network formerly named Twitter at @labour_history and his book is available here from Pitch Publishing or from all good bookshops.

Rugby Reloaded 194 - the origins of football in South America with Prof Matthew Brown

The latest episode of Rugby Reloaded talks to Professor Matthew Brown about his new book Sports in South America. A History. It’s a panoramic book that for the first time in English examines the origins of modern sports in South America from the mid-1800s to the first FIFA World Cup in Uruguay in 1930.

Among other things, it explains the continent had a rich history of sports before Europeans arrived there, casts a critical eye over the mythology of the 'fathers of football' who allegedly brought football to South American nations, and places women's sports back in their rightful context.

Drawing on a huge number of sources in Spanish and Portuguese, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of modern sport, and in the ways that sports have become entwined with national identity, culture and politics across South America.

Our interview focused on some of the key themes of football history that the book deals with: why ideas about 'fathers of football' are mistaken, questioning the importance of railways in soccer's development, why rugby never became a mass spectator sport, the problems faced by women athletes, and much more.

Maurice Oldroyd (1935-2023): an appreciation

IMaurice Oldroyd, one of rugby league’s greatest administrators, died yesterday. In tribute to a man of great principle, unstinting friendship, and boundless love of his sport, I’m posting a slightly edited version of my review of his autobiography which first appeared in Sport in History in 2016.

Maurice Oldroyd is one of the most important figures in the history of amateur sport in Britain in the twentieth century. As a founder and chief executive of the British Amateur Rugby League Association (BARLA) he was both the most articulate exponent of a specifically working-class form of amateurism and a significant figure in the ending of the Rugby Football Union’s ban on league players taking part in union.

His autobiography, Building The Family Game: A Rugby League Memoir, jointly written with pioneering rugby league historian Robert Gate, was published in 2014, and offers a valuable insight into his life, career and sports politics over the past forty years.

Born in 1935, Maurice Oldroyd grew up in a working-class household in Huddersfield where rugby league was part of the warp and weft of daily life. His aptitude for maths allowed him to escape the world of manual labour of his father and, like many talented working-class youths in the 1950s, he progressed through a series of white-collar jobs, all the time playing amateur rugby league, most notably for Holmfirth’s famous Underbank Rangers. When he finished playing at the age of 28, he became a referee.

He was also developing considerable administrative skills and a conviction that amateur rugby league was not fulfilling its full potential. The neglect and ineptitude of the Bill Fallowfield-led Rugby Football League had reduced amateur league to desperate straights by the start of the 1970s. Moreover, the RFU’s ban on players playing both codes of rugby severely hampered amateur rugby league’s ability to attract players. In Maurice’s home town, the local rugby union club even asked new members to affirm that ‘I have not taken part in rugby league football, either as an amateur or a professional’ before they could be accepted into membership.

Alongside Tom Keaveney, another talented local rugby league administrator, Maurice spearheaded the creation of BARLA in 1973. Despite the opposition of RFL boss Bill Fallowfield, BARLA quickly flourished. Within two years it had over 300 clubs playing under its flag and was recognised by the RFL and the Sports Council as amateur rugby league’s governing body. As its first full-time national administrator, much of the credit for this success was due directly to Oldroyd. 

As his autobiography makes clear, Maurice was motivated by more than mere love of his sport. He was, and remains, driven by a strong sense of justice. The formation of BARLA was based on a belief that the rank and file amateur rugby league player was not getting a fair deal from the RFL. This dovetailed with his belief that the RFU’s ban on playing rugby league was discrimination, pure and simple. The book proudly quotes a 1975 Manchester Evening News article describing BARLA’s campaign against the RFU ban as ‘fighting the establishment and men of immense power and influence’ (p. 60). Oldroyd himself is quoted as saying that the RFU’s ostracism of league players was ‘against all principles of human dignity’ (p. 61).

He astutely sought to bring public scrutiny to bear not on the RFU but on the Sports Council, the government body which distributed state funds to sport. In the late 1960s and early 1970s rugby union was one of its major beneficiaries, despite its refusal to put into practice the Sport Council’s policy of ‘Sport for All’. Initially, the Sports Council defended the RFU’s policy, and it sent a private letter to Robin Prescott, the RFU secretary, warning him that ‘it seems quite possible that Mr Oldroyd will go to the press’. But Maurice was not so easily brushed off, and enlisted MPs and lawyers to challenge the Sports Council’s policy. Increasingly embarrassed, the Sports Council was forced to exert some pressure on the RFU to rethink its ban. In 1984, BARLA’s campaign was joined by the Freedom in Rugby campaign and four years later by the All-Party Parliamentary Rugby League Group, and the RFU found itself under real pressure for the first time. BARLA’s growth and influence also became a cause of concern at Twickenham. Numerous internal discussions took place in the upper echelons of the RFU and in December 1983 it even convened a special meeting to discuss the success of BARLA and the threat it represented to union.

Maurice was also able to undermine the RFU’s claims to be the moral guardian of amateurism. He highlighted its hypocrisy in banning rugby league players while allowing players from other professional sports such as soccer and American football to play union, exposed its ‘shamateur’ methods of rewarding players, and also argued that BARLA was more genuinely amateur than union itself. In 1978 BARLA undertook its first overseas tour to Papua New Guinea, Australia and New Zealand. Each player had to raise funds to cover the cost of travel and the time they took off from work. Their only reward was an official tie, holdall and tracksuit, allowing Maruice to claim that BARLA was the true upholder of the amateur ethos, not the RFU.

Unlike rugby union, Maurice’s view of amateurism was not based on the belief it was morally superior to professionalism but on the ideals of community solidarity. BARLA believed that there was nothing wrong in paying players to play rugby, but that the vast majority played simply for enjoyment. If they were talented enough to be paid, all well and good, but those not so lucky, the costs of playing had to be shared. For Oldroyd, amateur was an adjective, not a noun as it was for the RFU.

His tenacious campaigning eventually paid off and, fifteen years after he had first written to the Sports Council to protest against the RFU’s ban, the RFU agreed in April 1987 that amateur rugby league players should be free to play rugby union if they chose. Even then, those who had played professional rugby league were still barred from rugby union, despite players of every other sport being allowed to play the fifteen-a-side game.  In 1993 Wasps’ full-back Steve Pilgrim was banned for a year by the RFU after playing a trial rugby league match for Leeds for nothing but travelling expenses. It would take the earthquake of rugby union's 1995 switch to professionalism before the fifteen-a-side game would treat all rugby players equally.

Maurice’s struggles did not end there. Rivalry between BARLA and the RFL over the direction of rugby league continued to be fractious and, perhaps as befitted a sport that emerged from a schism, the internal politics of the game often overwhelmed the pleasures of playing it. As the book makes clear, Oldroyd was invariably at the centre of these disputes, none of which had the historical importance of his achievements in the 1970s and 1980s.

Yet despite his controversial career, the tone of the autobiography is always honest and never less than gracious and generous to everyone with whom Oldroyd has encountered during his life, friend or temporary foe - an accurate reflection of the man himself. Building The Family Game is an important record of working-class amateur sport and a fitting tribute to one of the past half-century’s most important rugby administrators.

-- Maurice Oldroyd (with Robert Gate), Building The Family Game: A Rugby League Memoir (London: London League Publications, 2014). Pp. 132. £12.95 (pb). ISBN 978-1-909885-05-9. 

Out Now! 'Who Framed William Webb Ellis? And Other Puzzles in Rugby History'

My latest book Who Framed William Webb Ellis? And Other Puzzles In Rugby History is now out and available to buy from all good bookshops and direct from the publisher.

It’s the director’s cut of thirty episodes of Rugby Reloaded, featuring the extended scripts of episodes about the historical controversies in rugby, discussions about the evolution of various rules, a look at the art and culture of rugby, and much more. If you’ve ever had a question about some aspect of the history of rugby, there’s a good chance that I’ve tried to answer it in this book.

The cover, which you will recognise from the Rugby Reloaded podcast logo. is based on an illustration that appeared on the cover of the weekly Football Favourite on 27 November 1920. It was then used on the cover of the following season’s Northern Union Annual. It’s good to keep him alive a century later!

Rugby Reloaded 193 - Cricket and Class, with Duncan Stone

On this episode I talk to Duncan Stone's about his fascinating new book Different Class: The Untold Story of English Cricket.

Different Class is both a history of cricket from the grassroots and an analysis of the roots of the sport's attitudes to race and class. Duncan uncovers the reality of cricket behind the myth, and reveals the true story of working-class cricket in the south of England.

It’s a richly detailed book, based on years of unique archival research, which highlights how the history of cricket parallels the many of the key aspects of the conflicted stories of rugby and soccer. Most of all, for anyone wanting to understand English cricket's current crisis 'Different Class' is essential reading.

You can buy the book direct from the publishers, and there’s a pre-Christmas discount if you move quickly, by going to the website of Repeater Books.