Rugby Reloaded podcast archive - episodes 41-60

Click on the title to listen to the episode.

41. Soccer and the 1914 Christmas Truce

At Christmas 1914, British and German troops on the Western Front left their positions, crossed into No Man's Land, and fraternised with each other. In some places, football matches were played. This special Christmas edition of 'Rugby Reloaded' explores the myths and reality of the Christmas football matches, and discusses their importance to soccer's global image.

42. The Past, Present and Future of the Rugby League Challenge Cup

The Rugby League Challenge Cup is the sport's oldest continuous tournament. But in recent years, the thrill of the cup has been declining - and now the RFL are asking overseas clubs for six-figure bonds to take part. Are knock-out cup tournaments like the Challenge Cup and the FA Cup doomed to fade away? Find out what history tells us about the future of one of British sport's most prestigious tournaments on your latest ten-minute trek through the past.

43. Ebenezer Cobb Morley and the birth of the Football Association

Was Hull-born Ebenezer Cobb Morley the 'father of football'? Not unless his child was switched at birth. Morley's rules bore little resemblance to modern soccer and his leadership of the TA was a failure. But why do we need stories about 'fathers of football codes'? 

44. Refereeing & Philosophy with NRL referee Tim Roby

Rugby Reloaded plus is back - this week I'm talking to NRL and former Super League ref Tim Roby. Tim chats about his career, discusses the uses of philosophy for referees, contrasts league in Britain and Australia, talks about his experiences at the Koori Knockout Comp, and much, much more.

45. Red Star, Rumania & Eastern European Rugby

To mark Red Star Belgrade's debut in the Rugby League Challenge Cup, this week's episode looks at the history of the rugby codes in Eastern Europe, discovers what happened to Yugoslav rugby league, and investigates why Rumania never became part of the Six Nations. 

46. When Six Was Four - The Roots of the Six Nations

This week's Rugby Reloaded plus chats with journalist Huw Richards about the origins of the Six Nations, its early rivalry with soccer, how Rugby's Great Split of 1895 changed the tournament forever, and much more. 

47. Italy’s Other Football Code: The Rise of Italian Rugby

This week's Rugby Reloaded looks at the history of rugby in Italy and how national politics have shaped the game. From Mussolini to Berlusconi, the sport has always been seen as a way to influence society and business - and along the way it has fought its own civil war between union and league. 

48. 'When Ellery Was King': Sean McGuire on the 1980s and League Expansion

Rugby Reloaded plus this week talks to Sean McGuire, former St Helens' CEO and London rugby league pioneer. Sean chats about his experiences in London in the 1980s with the Hornsey Lambs and reflects on what that means for the future of rugby league, opportunities for expansion, and the never-ending thrill of the game. 

49. French Rugby League: ‘The Struggle and the Daring’ with Mike Rylance

This week's 'Rugby Reloaded plus' chats with Mike Rylance about his new book The Struggle and The Daring, just published by Scratching Shed. We talk about the history of French rugby league, its fabulous origins, ban by Vichy, the post-war struggles, immortal sides of the 1950s, and its fall from grace.

50. 100 Years since the King's Cup - but was it Rugby's 'first world cup'?

This week sees the centenary of thekick-off the 'King's Cup', the international military tournament that celebrated the end of World War One. But was it really 'rugby's first world cup' as some claim? As this week's podcast discovers, it was not a world cup but something far more interesting and complex, which shaped the future of international rugby union for the next fifty years. 

51. 'Numbering Up' Statistically speaking with the Rugby League Project

This week's 'Rugby Reloaded plus' interviews Andrew Ferguson, one of the brains behind the 'Rugby League Project' website, which aims to compile a complete database of the game's statistics. We talk about where the Project gets its stats, the problems of assessing matches, and why there are no unified records for the sport - not to mention swapping notes on ganglions, the old-school researcher's curse.

52. A Short History of the Scrum

The shape of things to scrum? This week's 'Rugby Reloaded' looks at the past, present and future of the scrum. Take a ten-minute trip back to the time when scrums worked the wrong way round and discover why the scrum's problems have always been a headache for all codes of the oval ball game. 

53. Rugby Union’s 50-22 proposal and the Evolution of Union and League

This week we take a deep dive into the announcement that rugby union may introduce a 50-22 rule modelled on rugby league's 40-20. Is it another case of union stealing league's clothes? This week's ten-minute rugby time tunnel looks at the evolution of rugby rules and asks if it is inevitable that union will go down the same road as league.

54. 1906: The Year That Changed the Oval World Forever

1906 was the year league went 13-a-side, the All Blacks transformed rugby union, and America football legalised the forward pass. Discover how 1906 revolutionised the Oval World in the new ‘Rugby Reloaded’ podcast. 

55. The American RL All Stars & lessons for today with Gavin Willacy

This week's 'Rugby Reloaded' plus talks to Gavin Willacy, author of No Helmets Required about the incredible story of the 1953 American All Stars tour of Australia. We chat about how it happened, why its promise failed to materialise, and what lessons can be learned as rugby league once again discusses expansion into North America. (With apologies for the poor sound quality on this episode)

56. Game of Throw-ins: A History of the Line-Out

This week we step in the ten-minute time tunnel to look at the history of the line-out in both rugby union and rugby league. The throw-in from touch is one of the few common rules remaining in soccer and rugby union, so we trace its evolution, discover why league abolished it, and consider what the future holds for it. 

57. Before the Wolfpack: A History of Rugby League in Canada

The Toronto Wolfpack kick-off their home season on Sunday, and so this week's 'Rugby Reloaded' travels back in time to unravel the forgotten history of rugby league in Canada before the Wolfpack. It's a tale of heroic pioneers in the 1930s and missed opportunities in the 1950s… 

58. Argentina: Why Soccer Defeated Rugby

In Argentina today, soccer is without question the passion of the people. Yet in 1900 soccer and rugby were equally as popular - so what happened? How did rugby lose out to soccer? This week's ten-minute time tunnel examines how social and political changes in Argentina not only changed the nation but also transformed sport, leaving rugby the sport of Argentina's social elite. 

59. Rugby in Asia and the Far East

Why was there no rugby in India? And why is rugby in Sri Lanka one of the sport's best kept secrets? This week's ten-minute time trek through rugby history examines the game in Asia and the Far East, looking at how China, Malaysia, India and Sri Lanka reflected both the past and the future of rugby union. 

60. Hybrid Heaven or Merger Most Foul? When Aussie Rules voted to merge with Rugby League

Rugby league and Aussie Rules to merge? Gridiron fusion with Aussie Rules? It could never happen - but it has, or at least been attempted. This week's 'Rugby Reloaded plus' sits down with Spencer Kassimir to explore the times when rugby league and Aussie Rules sat down to create a hybrid game, discover the World War Two game that brought together the best of the NFL and the VFL, and chat about the International rules AFL-GAA games.

Rugby Reloaded podcast archive - episodes 21-40

Click on the title to listen to the episode.

21. Once in a Lifetime: John Sutcliffe, Soccer’s Rise and Rugby’s Fall

This week's ten-minute time tunnel looks at the career of John Sutcliffe - from Bradford and England rugby, to Manchester United and England soccer, to European football management. Sutcliffe's life tells the story of football's incredible development in the space of a single lifetime. 

22. Did Sheffield Invent Soccer?

This week I'm investigating the claim that Sheffield is the true birthplace of modern soccer. Take a ten-minute tour of the early history of sport in the Steel City and discover Sheffield's intriguing football history - and how rugby played a vital role in its early years.

23. How the Rugby League Challenge Cup Final got to Wembley

It's Wembley Week for British rugby league - and to celebrate the game's annual day in the sun, this week's podcast takes ten minutes in the time tunnel to discover why and how rugby league's big day out ended up in London. 

24. Countdown to Rugby’s Great Split

On Wednesday 29 August it will be 123 years to the day since twenty-one of England's top rugby clubs met at the George Hotel to create the Northern Union. This week's ten-minute history tour takes a deep dive into the events of 1895 that led to that momentous meeting. 

25. What Happened After Vichy: French Rugby League Since World War 2

It's well known that the Vichy government in France banned rugby league in 1941. But what happened to the game after that? This week's episode looks at rugby league players in World War 2 and the faboulous rebirth and calamitous fall of the French game in the post-war years.

26. Women and football in the Nineteenth Century

Women have always played football - but the modern football codes of the 19th Century tried to keep them out. This week's bitesize time tunnel looks at how women fought to be part of football in Victorian times, both on the terraces and on the pitch. 

27. Spencer Kassimir on rugby league in North America

Ahead of the 2018 Tom Brock Lecture in Sydney, we talk to Tom Brock Scholar and sports consultant Spencer Kassimir about the history of the relationship between rugby league and girdiron football, and the prospects for the sport in North America.

28. Origins and Myths of Australian Rules Football

This week we look at the origins of Aussie Rules football and ask just how unique are the origins of the game? For most of its fans, it's an original Australian code of football, and many others believe that it is derived from the games of Aboriginal Australians. But, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the beginnings of the game are neither pure Australian nor anything like simple.

29. Glasgow. Football’s First Capital City

Look around the world and in almost every football code, the game is the sport of the city. This week's bitesize glimpse into football history looks at the orginal world capital of football: Glasgow. No other city was dominated by football like Glasgow, and it provided the template for the great footballing cities of the world.

30. The Birth of Gaelic Football

This week we're continuing our look at how the different football codes started - this week it's Gaelic football. How did the distinctive Irish game emerge? Is it really an ancient game? We'll debunk the myths and deconstruct the history... all in just ten minutes. 

31. A Short History of Black Players in Rugby League

It's Black History Month, so this week's podcast looks at the history of black players in British rugby league. Take a ten minute tour of the hidden history of a century of black achievement - and the obstacles still to be conquered - as players, captains and coaches in rugby league.

32. How Canadian Football Began

12-a-side, three downs and a Maple Leaf at its heart. This week we look at Canadian football, the unsung cousin of rugby and gridiron football. Take a ten-minute trip through Canadian history to discover how Canada came to have its own football code and how it paved the way for American football. 

33. Walter Camp and the Invention of American Football?

Did Walter Camp invent American football? Most of the history books say yes, but the reality is much more complicated. American football began as rugby but quickly started to change the rules to make a better spectacle - just like many other rugby-playing regions. Discover how and why it changed in your ten-minute intro to the orgins of the gridiron game. 

34. South African Rugby before it was an Afrikaner Game

Discover the origins of South African rugby and the hidden history of black and mixed race involvement in the game in our latest ten-minute tour of rugby history. This was a time when Afrikaners were a rare sight on the rugby field and the game was a symbol of the British Empire. 

35. Scotland and the Birth of International Rugby

The Scots have always felt they were as important as the English in the story of how rugby was born. This week's ten-minute trip back through time examines how Scotland kick-started international rugby and why their rivalry with the RFU went so deep and lasted so long. 

36. Empire of the Scrum: the History of Rugby in Japan

How did rugby come to Japan? Alone of all the Asian nations, Japan is the place where rugby is part of the national culture, despite it being a rival to (and a war-time enemy of) the English-speaking rugby-playing countries in the Pacific. Discover how rugby took the way of Bushido in our ten-minute time travel trip through 150 years of Japanese rugby. 

37. Tonga: From Tupou College to the Taumalolo Revolution

In October 2017 Jason Taumalolo started a rugby revolution when he opted to play for Tonga, the country of his parents' birth, in the Rugby League World Cup. But how did rugby start in Tonga? Why does the national rugby union side struggle, while its league side has never been more popular? 'Rugby Reloaded' takes a ten-minute tour of Tongan history for some answers.

38. The Lions' Tale: A Short History of England Rugby League International Team Names

Whatever happened to the Lions, British rugby league's national team?The answer is more complicated than you might think, showing how changing conceptions of nationality are reflected in sport, and why history is about more than the simply what happened in the past. Take a ten minute tour through 114 years of international and changing team titles with this week's 'Rugby Reloaded' podcast.

39. World War One & the Rise and Fall of Women’s Soccer

World War One gave birth to women's football football as a mass participation sport. For the first time ever, thousands of women could play the game they loved. But why did it take a war to give women the opportunity to play the game and why did it disappear so quickly? This week's ten-minute time tunnel podcast takes a deep dive to explore the link between war, football and women's struggle to play the game. 

40. The Birth of Rugby in Ireland

Rugby in Ireland can perhaps boast of having the world's oldest rugby club, and for a generation rugby had no rivals in Ireland. Yet within a decade it had been overtaken by soccer and Gaelic football. This week's podcast explores the birth of Irish rugby and its complicated history. 

Rugby Reloaded podcast archive - episodes 1-20

Click on the title to listen to the episode.

1. William Webb Ellis Was Framed!

In the first episode of our ten-minute half-time history talks, Rugby Reloaded explores the myth of William Webb Ellis, investigates why it emerged when it did, and looks at its unexpected consequences.

2. Rugby’s Great Own Goal

In 1880 The Times said ‘the players of the rugby union game are probably twice as numerous as those of theFootball Association'. Rugby often attracted bigger crowds than even for the FA Cup Final. So what happened? How did soccer overtake and eclipse rugby? This is the story of Rugby's Great Own Goal.

3. Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the 1895 Rugby Split

In this Easter special, we take a look at Sherlock Holmes and rugby. What does the resident of 221B Baker Street have to do with rugby, and what is his connection to rugby's great split of 1895? 

4. Why Does Wales Play the Wrong Type of Rugby?

In the second of our Easter weekend specials, we follow up the recent BBC Wales 'Rugby Codebreakers' documentary and asks why, if Welsh rugby had a similar industrial and social history to Northern England, is rugby union, and not rugby league, the national sport of Wales? 

5. How ‘Rugby’ Evolved into Rugby League

Our ten minute rugby history podcast this week goes way back to explore how rugby evolved in Victorian times, giving birth to both rugby league and rugby union. Stand by for way too much detail on the history of scrums and points systems. 

6. Albert Baskerville and the Birth of International Rugby League

This week’s Rugby Reloaded ten-minute history talk looks at how world rugby blew apart in 1907 and led to the birth of International rugby league - and how Albert Baskerville took a great leap into the unknown to change rugby forever. 

7. Jean Galia and the First Ten Years of French Rugby League

This week your ten minute rugby history fix looks at how rugby league came to France, almost conquered a nation, but was then forcibly 'deleted' from French sport and society by the Vichy government during World War Two.

8. How Two Words Broke Rugby Apart

Take ten minutes out to discover how the word 'Broken' and 'Time' tore rugby in two in the 1890s. Why did broken time become the issue that broke the game apart? We go all 'fly on the wall' at the 1893 RFU annual meeting to find out what was going on. 

9. Not the Lions: the 1888 British Rugby Tour Down Under

Spend ten minutes in rugby's time tunnel as we look at the first-ever British rugby tour to Australia and New Zealand. Although now claimed as the first tour of the rugby union British Lions, the tour was in reality opposed by the rugby authorities. Listen to how this unofficial team changed the face of international rugby forever. 

10. 1895: The Aftermath

This week's ten minute time tunnel takes us back to 1895 and the aftermath of Rugby's Great Split. We take a quick tour of how the split unfolded across the north over the next few years, and look at how rugby union started to re-organise after its near-death experience. 

11. The First Rugby Tour To Britain: The 1888 NZ Native Team

Take ten minutes out of your day to discover the amazing story of the 1888 NZ Native Touring Team to the British Isles. Pioneers of Māori rugby, the tourists won the hearts of many supporters but incurred the wrath of the English rugby authorities, leading to rugby's own mini 'Bodyline'-style controversy. 

12. Sevens, Nines and Sixes: the origins of 'limited player' rugby

This week our half-time history talk looks at the beginnings of sevens, nines and sixes - the 'short form' versions of rugby - in a journey that takes us from the Scottish Borders to downtown Batley. Once again, we discover that the truth about rugby history is rarely pure and never simple.

13. From Wallaroos to Kangaroos: Origins of Australian Rugby League

From the Wallaroos to the Kangaroos, discover how Australian rugby union's embrace of amateurism ripped the game apart and why the popularity of the game led to the creation of rugby league - all in just ten minutes.

14. The Wally McArthur Story: An Aboriginal Rugby League Pioneer

This is the story of Wally McArthur, the first Aboriginal rugby league player to play for an English club. Born a son of Australia's Stolen Generation, Wally blazed a trail for Aboriginal players when he signed for Rochdale Hornets in 1953 and went on to prove that true greatness is about much more than what happens on the pitch.

15. Rugby League’s American Dream

What links Walter Camp, Lucius Banks and Harry Sunderland? As our latest ten-minute history tour explains, they've all played parts in rugby league's dream of establishing itself in the United States. Listen to the complete story of how league almost came to America in the 1930s. 

16. Why Does Rugby League Have a Six-Tackle Rule?

This week's half-time history talk looks at why league has a six tackle rule. Was limited tackle rugby brought in to stop St George's domination of Australia in the 1960s or does it have deeper links with American football's four downs system (and Canada's three downs)? It's a six-tackle history in just ten minutes.

17. Wallabies versus Kangaroos: the battle for the soul of Australian rugby

Take ten minutes to discover how the Wallabies and Kangaroos battled it out for Australian rugby supremacy. This was a war that was fought on the playing fields of Britain as much as it was was on the paddocks of Sydney - and it left rugby league the winner.

18. Rugby’s Hundred Year War

This week's ten-minute time tunnel looks at rugby union's one hundred war against rugby league. From 1895 to 1995 rugby union excluded rugby league players from playing its game, developing a system that even rugby union's Danie Craven described as 'the strictest form of apartheid'. How and why could this happen? 

19. Soccer 1885 versus Rugby 1895: Why Didn't Soccer Split Like Rugby?

How did soccer avoid a split over professionalism in 1885 but rugby tore itself apart over the same issue in 1895? In a special prview of my new book 'How Football Began' this week's ten-minute meander through sporting history explains why soccer stayed united but rugby split. 

20. Why Soccer Went Global… but Rugby Didn’t

How did soccer became the global game - but not rugby? This week we take a ten minute world tour and compare the fate of soccer and rugby in Argentina and Brazil. Take a listen and discover how soccer defeated rugby to become the undisputed champion of the football world. 

‘How Football Began’: a sneak preview

I’m very pleased to announce that my new book How Football Began: A Global History of How The World’s Football Codes Were Born will be published on 1 September by Routledge. The title tells you all you need to know about what’s inside - but if you’d like a flavour of what to expect, here’s a quick rundown of each chapter.

UPDATE! Routledge are now offering a 20% discount on pre-orders of the book. Simply click here and enter the code FLR40 at the checkout. 

1. The Failure of the Football Association

The Football Association was created in 1863 to unite England’s fledging football clubs under a single set of ‘universal rules’. It failed, creating a rulebook that was continually disputed and revised, and alienating many clubs who would go on to form the Rugby Football Union in 1871. Far from marking the start of soccer’s inexorable rise to popularity, the early FA did little to popularise the sport, and would play second fiddle to the RFU for the next two decades.

2. Before the Beginning: Folk Football

Propelling a large ball to a goal with the hand or foot has been a feature of almost every human society. In pre-industrial Britain, football of varying types was played extensively. Yet this was a recreation that was intimately connected to the rhythms and traditions of rural life, and had no substantive continuity with the modern forms of the game that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. It would take the industrial revolution of the Victorian era to give birth to football in its modern guise.

3. The Gentleman’s Game

The first football clubs of the modern era emerged as part of the growing business and recreational networks of young middle-class men who had learnt the game at school, and who sought to bring the spirit of Muscular Christianity - as popularised due to the 1857 publication of Tom Brown’s Schooldays - to their new world of leisure. Like their equivalents such as the East India Club (1849) and the Hurlingham Club (1869), these were exclusive clubs that had no interest in popularising their sport. Nor did they bother too much about the rules of football; for these young gentlemen, the game was the thing.

4. Sheffield: Football Beyond the Metropolis

The emergence of football was not restricted to the metropolis. In Sheffield, and to a lesser extent Nottingham, the strength of local cricket culture provided the basis for the growth of a new football culture that was based on local rivalry, regular competition, and growing media interest in the sport. Although claims that Sheffield was the true birthplace of soccer have come to resemble rugby’s William Webb Ellis myth - indeed, many of Sheffield’s rules were drawn from those of Rugby School - the outlines of modern football culture can first be discerned in Sheffield and Nottingham.

5. The End of the Universal Game

By 1870 it was clear that the FA’s desire for a universal football code for all clubs was not feasible. The growth of rugby football had oustripped soccer all over Britain. In response, the FA’s new secretary, C.W. Alcock, initiated an England versus Scotland match and in 1871 began the FA Cup tournament. Clubs were increasingly forced to make a choice between one or other code. When the rugby clubs responded in 1871 by forming the Rugby Football Union (RFU), football was irrevocably split.

6. From the Classes to the Masses

As the profile of association and rugby football grew due to the popularity of cup competitions, it began to find an audience beyond the world of middle-class young gentlemen. Cup tournaments turned clubs into representatives of local communities. The increased leisure time and spending power of the working classes drew them to football as spectators and players. In major industrial cities such as Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Cardiff, football of whatever code soon became the passion of the masses.

7. Glasgow: Football Capital of the Nineteenth Century

Nowhere was the enthusiasm for football so strongly expressed or so intimately wound up with the life of the city as Glasgow. By the early 1880s, the city probably had more players, more clubs and more spectators than anywhere else in Britain. Such was the importance of soccer to Glasgow that by the early 1900s it had three stadia that could hold more than 100, 000 people, just under half of its population. Glasgow would establish the template of the football city that would be replicated in the twentieth century in Barcelona, Milan, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janiero.

8. The Coming of Professionalism

The burgeoning popularity of association and rugby not only brought spectators flooding in but also saw unprecedented amounts of money come into the game. Increased rivalry for cup success also meant that clubs sought to attract the best players and by the end of the 1870s both soccer and rugby were paying players. Faced with a revolt from its northern clubs, in 1885 the FA legalised professionalism and three years later the leading professionals clubs formed the Football League. But in rugby, the RFU decided that soccer’s experience was not for them and banned all payments to players. It was a fateful decision.

9. Women and Football: Kicking against the Pricks

Modern football in all forms was created as a sport for young men that would guard against effeminacy and homosexuality. Women were not welcome. But women still wanted to play the game. After a series of commercially-driven false starts to women’s soccer in the 1880s, the 1895 Lady Footballers’ side captured the spirit of the ‘New Woman’ movement. But it wasn’t until World War One that women’s football became a mass sport - and its promising beginnings were snuffed out as post-war reaction forced women out of the factories and back into the homes as wives and mothers. It wouldn’t be until the 1960s that the women’s liberation movement and the enthusiasm of working-class women once more mode football a viable option for the majority of women.

10. Rugby Football: A House Divided

Soccer’s professionalism and its league system launched it to unimaginable popularity. Rugby lost its early advantage and the RFU’s insistence on the strictest amateurism plunged the sport into civil war. Players were banned and clubs suspended. Clubs in the north, were rugby still rivalled soccer in popularity, argued for ‘broken-time payments’ two be made to working-class players who took time off work to play the game. The RFU rejected the demand decisively and in the summer of 1895 the top clubs in the north decided that enough was enough, and broke away to form the Northern Union.

11. Melbourne: A City and Its Football

Rugby had always seen itself as the game of British imperial nationalism, and thanks to ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’ it spread across the English-speaking world. Nowhere was this more true than in Australia and especially in Melbourne. Barely two decades after the city had been founded, young middle-class men in the city had adapted rugby rules to create their own football code, which would become known as Australian Rules. Nowhere else was a code and a city so intertwined. Yet far from being a symbol of Australian separateness, Melbourne football was no less a symbol of Britishness than anywhere else in the British Empire.

12. Australian Rules and the Invention of Football Traditions

All sports have their done creation myths and invented traditions. Most famously, rugby has William Webb Ellis. Australian Rules is a unique laboratory to see how changing ideas about national identity are reflected in narratives about the origins of football. From being a proudly British sport until the end of empire in the 1950s, to imagining that it was derived from Gaelic Football in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, to believing that it originated in Aboriginal ball games in the liberal era of the early twenty-first century, the mythology of Australian Rules highlights how football mirrors the shifting nature of national politics.

13. Ireland: Creating Gaelic Football

While the other football codes prided themselves on being British or, in North America, part of Anglo-Saxon culture, huge numbers of football followers in Ireland rejected Britishness as the enemy of the Irish people. But there was no native football Irish football code that could offer an alternative to soccer or especially rugby. So the founders of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) had to create their own code of football from scratch. Rejecting rugby, they took from different codes but were able to establish Gaelic football because of the GAA’s close links to its local communities and Irish nationalist, religious and cultural networks.

14. Football and Nationalism in Ireland and Beyond

Gaelic football was the only code of football that rejected its identity with the British world. Yet the leaders of the GAA accepted the Muscular Christian framework of sport, substituting Irish nationalism for British nationalism. Its nationalism seemed more overt only because it was cut against the prevailing attitudes of other football codes. In reality, they too were no less nationalist or militaristic than the GAA. All football codes were closely linked to the military and embraced an ideology of racial and national superiority, links that would become stronger and reach their apotheosis in World War One.

15. American Football: The Old Game in the New World

Football in America began as rugby but, as in Australia, Ireland and much of the rugby-playing world, soon broke from what Americans saw as the limitations of the rugby game. The game evolved rapidly, moving to eleven-a-side and abandoning the scrum, yet this was no more an expression of ‘American exceptionalism’ as later historians would claim than the changes to rugby's rules elsewhere. Thanks to the tight control of the Ivy League universities, college football quickly became a mass-spectator, but not a mass-participation, sport.

16. Canadian Football: Between Scrum and Snapback

As a loyal member of the British Empire, Canada embraced football in its rugby form in the 1860s and 1870s. Yet its proximity to the United States exerted constant pressure on its sporting choices. In the 1870s rugby footballers in Ontario anticipated developments in American football by developing a scrum-less form of rugby, but its loyalty to British conceptions of football prevented it from breaking completely with rugby rules. It would not be until the 1900s that Canadian football emerged as a distinct sport in its own right, somewhere mid-way between British rugby and American football, reflecting the political and cultural position of Canada itself.

17. Rugby League Football: From a People’s Game to a Proletarian Sport

Rugby’s 1895 split cleaved the sport along class lines, and the Northern Union, which became the Rugby Football League in 1922, quickly became rooted in the industrial working-class communities of northern England. It changed the rules of the game to make it more attractive, paid its players and created the league and cup competitions that the RFU had opposed. All of these developments had been discussed in rugby before the split, and represented an alternative road for mass-spectator rugby. Yet the hostility of the RFU, which ostracised anyone connected with the league game, and the juggernaut of soccer’s popularity, initially locked the sport into its heartlands.

18. The 1905-06 Football Crisis: North America

By legalising professionalism in 1885, soccer had freed itself from the problems that would plague the other football codes. By the mid-1900s, American and Canadian football has been consumed by controversies over commercialism, professionalism and the violence of the game. The president of the United States intervened and many leading university administrators called for the abolition of football. Top west coast universities switched to rugby. Faced with this existential threat, football reformed its rules to make it safer, which included legalising the forward pass. Yet it did nothing to resolve the issue of money in the sport, and established a system of amateur hypocrisy that still prevails today.

19. The 1905-06 Football Crisis: Rugby

The problems of commercialism and professionalism did not leave rugby after the 1895 split. Wherever rugby was a mass spectator sport, especially in Australia, New Zealand and Wales, the game became engulfed by these problems. When the all-conquering 1905 All Blacks returned home, they became they lightening rod for player discontent, and in 1907 a professional rugby league New Zealand side toured Britain. In Australia, a simmering player revolt came to a head the same year and rugby league quickly gained ascendency. In Wales, rugby league clubs were established in the Welsh rugby heartlands but proved to be short-lived - yet rugby’s global crisis had changed the game forever.

20. Soccer: The Modern Game for the Modern World

Soccer’s embrace of professionalism fundamentally changed the nature of the game. Unlike the rugby codes which still largely retained amateur rules and administration, soccer could now claim to be a meritocratic game, open to any male with the talent to play. This proved to be extremely appealing to the middle-class young men of Europe and South America, who saw soccer as an expression of modernity and universalism. Many rejected their own national traditions of gymnastics to embrace the game, and, keen to promote it regardless of the indifference of the British soccer authorities, would found FIFA in 1904.

21. The Global Game

While British engineers, merchants and educationalists would take soccer around the world, they were not the people who popularised it. Many British expatriate communities abandoned soccer as it became popular among the local population, choosing rugby for its exclusivity, and the driving force behind soccer’s exponential growth in the non-English speaking world became the local middle-classes who sought not only recreation but also a means of expressing a newly-developing national identity. Soccer had become the global game by breaking the link with its British inventors.

Fifty Years Since the Watersplash Final

- - 11 May marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1968 Challenge Cup Final between Leeds and Wakefield Trinity. As the record books show, Leeds won 11-10 but the final is best remembered for Don Fox's missed conversion that would have won the cup for Trinity. On Saturday 12 May Huddersfield University's Heritage Quay and Rugby League Cares, will be hosting a special anniversary event to celebrate the match.

It will feature talks from some of the players from the 1968 final,  the premier of a new BBC documentary about the 1968 Challenge Cup final, and a special performance of They Walked on Water, a play written by Peter Hirst based on the book by former Wakefield MP David Hinchliffe. For more details about the day, click here. 

Sadly I won't be able to make it but here are my thoughts on a seminal moment in rugby league.

The 1968 Challenge Cup Final will go down in history not only as the Watersplash Final - in many ways it represented the watershed final for our game.

The great Don Fox and 'that kick'

For Trinity fans this is obvious. The 1960s were the greatest era in the history of the club. Four Wembley appearances in nine years brought the club three challenge cup victories. And another four Championship Finals brought the league championship trophy back to Belle Vue twice. Not to mention three Yorkshire Cup triumphs.Since then, the club has made one further Wembley appearance and won the Yorkshire Cup just once, in the competition’s final year of 1992.

It was also the era of the Golden Generation of Trinity players. Eight Wakefield players went on Great Britain tours in the 1960s, and their names ring down the ages: Fox, Brooke, Turner, Cooper, Poynton, Haigh, Wilkinson and Jones. Trinity - and the game - has seen nothing like them since.

But it was also a Watershed Year for the game as a whole. In the 1967-68 season, attendances increased slightly to a total of 2.1 million people going to league matches. It was the last time for years that crowds rose. After 1968 they fell off a cliff. Six years later they had almost halved to just 1.1. million. 

People feared for the future of the game. Hull KR official Ron Chester was quoted in 1971 as saying that ‘rugby league is not dying, it’s dead’. He was neither the first nor the last to say this, and like all those before and after him, he was would be proved wrong. 

And, of course, during the 1960s the game had become a fixture of the BBC’s Saturday afternoon Grandstand. The Cup Final became part of the BBC’s annual routine of major sports events. And Eddie Waring became a household name throughout Britain because of it.

1968 was to prove the most memorable TV season for the game because of one match - the Challenge Cup Final - for reasons that we all know. It provided perhaps the one memory of the game that non-rugby league sports fans (and even non-sporting members of the public) could recall.

For a long time I personally hated that moment, because I thought the BBC used it to promote a patronising - and even a pitying - attitude to our game. But as I’ve got older, I’ve come to see what I think is the bigger picture. Don missing the conversion was about much more than rugby league, more than even sport itself. 

It was about life. 

Because triumph and tragedy are never far apart. The difference between success and failure is always small. Even the mightiest - and Don was indeed a mighty player - can be laid low by the tiniest error or miscalculation. And who knows what fate will bring us in the next moment?

Nothing captures that better than the last seconds of the 1968 Cup Final. In that one moment, Don was the modern equivalent of a mythical hero of ancient Greece, who had victory snatched away from him by a simple twist of fate. 

And that’s why the 1968 Challenge Cup Final will go down as one the greatest moments of all time, not just in rugby league, but in the whole of world sport.

William Webb Ellis Was Framed! - the Rugby Reloaded podcast launch

I'm pleased to say that Rugby Reloaded now has a podcast, memorably titled the Rugby Reloaded Podcast. The first episode tackles the William Webb Ellis myth, looking at the reasons it emerged and the consequences it had for both codes of rugby.

You can download it here from iTunes or listen to it here on Soundcloud.

The Rugby Codebreakers - watch again

If you didn't catch the BBC Wales documentary about Welsh players in rugby league - The Rugby Codebreakers - on Sunday, you can watch it on BBC iPlayer here or here. The presenter Carolyn Hitt, producer Alan Golding and director Tariq Ali did a wonderful job, so if you haven't seen it, drop everything and watch it now!

Welsh Codebreakers in the Inter-War Years

Ahead of BBC Wales' The Rugby Codebreakers, a fascinating and moving documentary about Welsh rugby players who 'went North' to play rugby league, I've reprinted below a piece on Welsh league players in the interwar years taken from my 2006 book Rugby League in 20th Century Britain.

Gus Risman as captain of the 1946 Lions' Tour

In the 1920s and 1930s English rugby league was enriched by scores of Welsh players who journeyed north to receive the rewards their rugby talents deserved. Names like Jim Sullivan and Gus Risman, who both went north from Cardiff as teenagers in the 1920s, light up the rugby league firmament to this day, but there were also numerous lesser talented but equally committed players who made their careers, and often their homes, in the three counties of rugby league.

Indeed, the eminent Welsh historian Gareth Williams has estimated that for every international Welsh rugby union player who switched to rugby league, of which there were sixty-nine,  another twelve uncapped players would follow, and that around nine hundred players moved from South Wales to play rugby league between 1919 and 1939. But the actual figure is less than half of that. An analysis of the minutes of Management Committee of the Northern Rugby Football League, which governed the league competition and authorised the registration of all professional players in the league, shows that 392 players from Wales were registered as professionals with northern clubs in this period.

The largest proportion of these Welsh players moved north before the worst of the economic depression took its toll of the Welsh industrial heartlands in the late 1920s and 1930s. If we exclude the 1919-20 season, when many players were still being demobilised, and the aborted 1939-40 season, the average number of players going north prior to the 1926 General Strike was slightly over twenty-five per season, and only in the 1924-25 season did less than twenty players move. In contrast, an average of just under seventeen players went north each year in the thirteen seasons between the General Strike and the outbreak of war. And in only four of those seasons did twenty players or more join rugby league, still one season less than in the much shorter 1920-1926 period.

Even so, rugby players represented a statistically insignificant proportion of the 430,000 Welsh people who emigrated in the inter-war years. Those without rugby skills did not go to the north of England but to the new engineering and services industries of the midlands and the south east. ‘The accents [of those residents of Slough who turned out to welcome a Hunger March of from Wales in the 1930s] were so thick I thought that we were in Rhondda, with this difference, instead of silent pits, massive factories all lit up were in full go,’ reported a Welsh hunger marcher in 1936. Indeed, one of the reasons given for the creation of professional rugby league clubs in London in the mid-1930s was the hope that they would attract support from Welsh migrants who had recently moved to the south east. 

Although rugby league clubs paid great attention to talent-spotting in Wales - in 1938 St Helens paid their Welsh scout £1/10 shillings per week, plus £1 travelling expenses, £7/10 when a player he signed made fourteen appearances and 5 per cent of any transfer fee - the reality was that Welsh rugby union’s loss of talent was a self-inflicted wound. The vast majority of Welsh players went north because they wanted to earn money for their rugby skills, in the same way that their soccer and cricket-playing compatriots could do. It was the WRU’s amateur ethos and refusal to pay them which forced players to leave Wales. The experience of the young Jim Sullivan was typical and illustrates the problems which amateurism caused:

I was serving my apprenticeship to a boiler-maker, and I seemed to have little prospect of securing another job … the Cardiff club would have done anything to keep me, but when I broached the subject, officials said that I could have been given a job on the ground, but that would have meant me being classed as a professional.

Nor was it only the lack of employment opportunities which influenced players’ decisions. The risk of injury and subsequent hardship, given that rugby union insurance schemes were extremely tightly policed (indeed, many officials saw insurance as tantamount to professionalism), was also powerful incentive to take the money and go north.

Rugby league’s appeal to Welsh rugby union players was simple. It offered them the opportunity to benefit financially from their footballing skills. Many were given jobs on a club’s ground staff or with companies connected to club directors. For others, clubs guaranteed to make up a minimum wage if the job which was found for the player did not pay an adequate sum. Some were given the tenancy of a pub. Most importantly, hardly any were given the type of heavy industrial work they would do in Wales. And at least some Welsh players, such as Neath’s Dai Davies who went north in 1926, saw the union game as a stage from which they could land a league contract. In short, rugby league gave working-class Welsh rugby players the chance to escape from a life spent down the pit, in the steel works or on the dole.

Of course, there were also limited opportunities to receive money or employment in Welsh rugby union. Before going north, Dai Davies was paid a flat rate of £3 per match regardless of the result when he played for Neath in 1926 and many others doubtless received similar payments. And from the late 1920s, the relatively healthier economic fortunes of some English union clubs in the South West meant that it was possible for Welsh players to ‘go South’, and receive a job and perhaps surreptitious payments.

But for the players who ‘went south’, there was a world of a difference between a professional contract in league and the sleight of hand of shamateurism. The covert nature of the payments meant that they were unreliable and unenforceable, unlike those made under a contract, and could not provide any guarantees for the future. Nor could players receive large amounts such as bonuses or signing-on fees, which could lift them out of the daily routine. And, of course, the ever-present threat of denunciation and being banned from the sport underlined the insecurity of the paid rugby union player.

Indeed, the damage which the WRU’s adherence to amateurism did to their own game was exacerbated by the life-time ban it imposed on players who played rugby league. This ruled out the prospect of anyone ever returning to Wales to play rugby union. A number of players who went north found themselves unsuited to the different demands that league placed on them yet could not return to their original game – and of the sixty-nine internationals who switched to league, only twelve reached similar heights in their new sport by playing at Test match level. The WRU’s amateurism forced it to ostracise any player who wished to return to union. 

In the one hundred years between the founding of the Northern Union in 1895 and rugby union’s adoption of professionalism in 1995, the WRU only allowed one player back to play union. Glyn John signed for Leigh as a seventeen-year old in 1949 but after two matches in league decided that he wanted to return to union and repaid his £450 signing-on fee. Because he was under eighteen when he signed for Leigh the WRU decided that the laws against professionalism did not apply to him and welcomed him back into the fold. In 1954 he played twice for Wales, much to the chagrin of the Scottish Rugby Union, whose protests that he was a professional forced the WRU to cave in and end his international career. Such was the way in which the WRU repaid his loyalty.

Although John was unique in being allowed to change his mind, a great number of those who went north never felt the need to reconsider their decision. Many Welshmen made their homes in the northern towns in which they had become stars and symbols of the community. Like many, Trevor Foster, whose career as a player and an official of Bradford was to last more than sixty-five years, was initially chary of succumbing to the blandishments of the league scout, Bradford Northern’s managing director Harry Hornby, in 1938:

Mr Hornby looked at me and said, ‘Are you ready?’ I said ‘I’m not going.’ He went red, white and blue and yellow and tore a strip off me. ‘You’ve brought me all the way from Yorkshire and you’re not going to sign - what’s the big idea?’ I said ‘I want a Welsh cap.’ He said ‘Here. There’s £100, £200, £300, £400. Go and buy six Welsh caps.’

Just at that moment my elder sister, who lived a few doors away, came into the bar [of his parents’ pub]. My mum said to her ‘Trevor’s not going.’ She walked into the dining room where we were talking and she said ‘Mum said you’re not going.’ I said ’No I’m not. I want a Welsh cap.’ She said ‘What if you break your leg next Saturday when you play Penarth?’

I picked up the pen and signed. And the greatest thing I ever did was to turn [professional] and play for Bradford Northern.

Canada joins rugby league... in 1943

The story of rugby league in Canada has reached a new and exciting stage with the success of the Toronto Wolfpack. But as  you can hear in my League Culture podcast, the history of Canadian rugby league stretches back over 80 years.

Below, I've reprinted one of the most important documents of that history, the November 1943 letter to the RFL secretary John Wilson from John MacCarthy, Canadian rugby's leading coach and journalist. You can read more about MacCarthy in Doug Sturrock's comprehensive history of Canadian rugby union, It's a Try - The History of Rugby in Canada.

As could be expected from a committed expansionist such as Wilson (he masterminded the expansion of rugby league to France in the early 1930s), a reply was despatched immediately answering MacCarthy's questions and telling him that the RFL 'desire to assist you to the utmost of our ability' despite being in the midst of World War Two.

MacCarthy was vindicated and league became the leading sport in Nova Scotia in the 1940s, but changes in Canadian society and the inability of the RFL to take advantage of the opportunity across the Atlantic led to it vanishing in the early 1960s. Seventy-five years after this historic letter, let's hope that the game doesn't miss today's opportunity to correct one of rugby league's great missed opportunities.

Credit: RFL Archives

How the Rugby League World Cup 2017 signals a change in international sport

I wrote a piece for The Conversation news site about how the success of Tonga, Fiji and Lebanon in the 2017 RLWC has raised the profile of diaspora-based national sports teams, and how this reflects the changing nature of national and local identity in the 21st Century. You can read it here.

Before the Wolfpack - Rugby League in Canada and beyond

Syd Gaunt [bottom right], Canadian rugby league pioneer, amid the burnt-out wreckage of Rochdale Hornets' stand in 1935. 

The success of the Toronto Wolfpack threatens to be one of the most important developments in international rugby league for generations. But the game isn't a stranger to Canada - as I discuss in this talk for the League Culture podcast from late last year, it has been played on and off since the 1930s.

Stuart Morris at League Culture [if you don't subscribe, do it now] has also posted a couple of earlier interviews I did with him on the emergence of international rugby league in Yugoslavia and Italy after World War 2 and in North America, the Pacific and points elsewhere.

And if you can't get enough of a Hull accent, here's a link to an interview I did with Bruce Berglund of the indispensable New Books in Sport podcast about my latest book 'The Oval World' and the history of the rugby codes around the world.

David Storey & Lindsay Anderson's 'This Sporting Life'

I'm publishing the article below in tribute to David Storey, who died today. It originally appeared under the title 'Sex, class and the critique of sport in This Sporting Life' as a chapter in the 2013 book 'Fields of Vision: The Arts in Sport' edited by Doug Sandle, Jonathan Long, Jim Parry and Karl Spracklen.

Lindsay Anderson’s acclaimed film version of David Storey’s 1960 novel This Sporting Life (for which Storey also wrote the screenplay) was released in 1963. Born into a mining family in Wakefield in 1933, Storey had won a scholarship to the local Queen Elizabeth Grammar School. After leaving, he somewhat incongruously straddled his new and old worlds by studying at London’s Slade School of Fine Art while playing rugby league for Leeds ‘A’ (reserve) team at the weekends. At the age of eighteen he had signed a contract for Leeds because, he later recounted, “what I really wanted to do was go to art school. Taking the contract was going to be the only way I could pay for my education”(Observer Sports Monthly, 2005: p. 7). It was from that experience from which the novel was drawn.

Storey’s life was that of a classic working-class grammar school boy, caught between the two contrasting and often conflicting worlds of his past and his future. This was something of which he was acutely aware during his time as a a rugby league player: “being perceived as an effete art student often made the dressing room a very uncomfortable place for me”(Observer Sports Monthly, 2005: p. 7). Nor was his time at art school happy: “at the Slade meanwhile I was seen as a bit of an oaf,” he later remembered (Campbell, 2004: p. 31). His description of the character Radcliffe in his eponymous 1963 novel - “Grammar school broke him in two” - seems to have applied equally to himself. Storey’s ambiguity towards rugby league and sense of alienation from his surroundings inform the narrative of both the novel and the film.

The heart of the novel describes the relationship between the rugby league player Arthur Machin and his widowed landlady Valerie Hammond (their names were changed to Frank and Margaret in the film), combining a finely wrought understanding of the emotional entanglement of the couple with an accurate, if one-sided, description of the seamier realities of rugby league. As in the novel, the film depicts Machin as a young man largely impervious to the world around him, while Mrs Hammond is a woman crushed by the society around her. Although the plot is compressed in the screenplay, the film parallels the major events and the characterisations of the novel as if on tramlines, but Lindsay Anderson’s direction allows the nuances and complexities of the relationships between the major characters to be drawn out visually, arguably giving the film a greater emotional subtlety than is achieved by the novel.

Both the novel and the film are firmly located in what became known in the late 1950s as the ‘kitchen sink’ drama that aimed, largely for the first time in mainstream British culture, to portray the lives of working-class people in a realistic and usually sympathetic framework. The most prominent examples of the genre were Alan Sillitoe’s novels and their film versions Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Shelagh Delaney’s play and subsequent film A Taste of Honey (1961). But This Sporting Life differs fundamentally from Sillitoe’s work (and Delaney’s in a different sense). Although many have described Frank Machin as a ‘working-class hero’ or anti-hero in the mould of Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) or Colin Smith (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner) this is not strictly accurate. Sillitoe’s characters are conscious rebels, kicking against a society which seeks to force them into roles they are not prepared to accept. ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down,’ Seaton memorably proclaims at the start of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Lindsay Anderson and Richard Harris at Wakefield Trinity's  Belle Vue ground.

In contrast, Frank Machin is not a rebel. His desire to conform and be accepted is hampered only by his inability to understand the codes by which he is expected to live his life, not by his rejection of them. This difference was recognised by Anderson, who told Sight and Sound during the shooting of the film that “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was a thoroughly objective film, while This Sporting Life is almost entirely subjective… I have tried to abstract the film as much as possible from so as not to over-emphasise the locations and keep attention on the situation between the characters” (Milne, 1962: p. 115). Indeed, in contrast to Sillitoe’s work, This Sporting Life has more in common with Walter Greenwood’s pre-war novel Love on the Dole, with its depiction of stultifying conformity and the extinguished hopes of working-class people.

Produced at the end of the New Wave of British realist cinema, the film of This Sporting Life was a major success in Britain and America, with Harris being nominated for an Oscar. Filmed in stark black and white and unremittingly bleak in tone, it was shot largely in Leeds and at rugby league grounds at Wakefield Trinity (for the match scenes) and Halifax (for the external, post-match shots). Somewhat incongruously, a library shot of a crowd at a Twickenham international match can also be fleetingly glimpsed after Machin is seen scoring a try. Anderson made full use of Wakefield Trinity’s players and coaching staff (indeed, the first lines of the film are spoken by former Great Britain player and then Trinity coach Ken Traill), and one of the most memorable scenes is of a flowing movement leading to a try mid-way through the film, which is actually footage of Wakefield’s try in their 5-2 defeat of Wigan in the quarter-final of the 1963 Rugby League Challenge Cup.

Although the film was welcomed by many people in rugby league for putting the sport in the public eye - Harris was made an honorary president of Wakefield Trinity and its players and officials were invited to the premiere - it was not welcomed by everyone in the sport. At a discussion at the 1963 annual meeting of the Yorkshire Federation of Rugby League Supporters’ Clubs, representatives of Hull Kingston Rovers complained that the film was not a fair reflection and was ‘detrimental to the rugby league code’. Supporters from Wakefield Trinity claimed that they were not aware of ‘the true nature’ of the film until it was premiered, presumably not having bothered to read the book (YFRLSC minutes, 15 June 1963). Reviewing the film for the Rugby Leaguer, the sport’s weekly newspaper, Ramon Joyce (a pseudonym used by Raymond Fletcher, who later became the Yorkshire Post’s chief rugby league correspondent) commented that ‘my worst fears of the film… were unfortunately realised’ (Joyce, 1963: p. 4). This attitude towards the film has persisted in rugby league circles, to the extent that the editor of one of the sport’s weekly newspapers told the author in 2012 that he felt that the film was ‘anti-rugby league’.

Transgressive relationships

However, such a narrow view is akin to not seeing the wood for the trees. Despite appearances, this is not actually a film about rugby league or sport, it is a film about relationships and the stifling conformity that crushes the human spirit and distorts sexuality. Rugby league is, as it was and remains in industrial West Yorkshire and other parts of the north of England, part of the complex social structure that provides the context and the backdrop for the personal drama that unfolds. The sport’s acute sense of class position and its rootedness in the region’s industrial working-class culture allowed both Storey and Anderson to highlight the underlying personal tensions of working-class life with a directness that would be impossible using either soccer, where full-time professionalism distanced players from the local community, or rugby union, which was animated by an explicitly middle-class value system.

Indeed, one might mischievously suggest that if Tennessee Williams had been born in Castleford, Yorkshire rather than Columbus, Mississippi, This Sporting Life is perhaps the type of screenplay he would have written. Subtle class distinctions, suffocating social norms and transgressive and dysfunctional sexual relationships are as central to This Sporting Life as they to Williams’ plays. And, of course, Richard Harris’s somewhat uneven performance in the film - most notably in his inability to master the local accent - is rather obviously derived from Marlon Brando’s portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan’s 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire.

As with Williams’ work, sex is central to This Sporting Life. In the opening scene, after Machin has his teeth broken by a stiff-arm tackle that leaves him unconscious, the first thing that Ken Traill, the real-life rugby league international who portrayed the fictional team coach in the film, says to him is that ‘you won’t want to see any tarts [women] for a week’.

Before he signs for the club, Machin’s first encounter with the rugby league team is at a dance hall in the city centre when he cuts in on a dance between a player, Len Miller, one of the rugby’s club ‘hard men’. and a young woman. Miller tells him to go away and when Machin refuses, Miller says to him, ‘Do you want a thumping, love?’ and they then go outside to fight. The use of the word ‘love’ between two men, although commonly in usage by miners and other men in the Yorkshire coalfields until at least the 1980s, would have appeared to most viewers of the film to be at odds with the aggressively heterosexual world portrayed on the screen.

Most importantly, almost all of the relationships in the film do not fall within the bounds of what would be assumed to normative sexual relations in the north of England in the late 1950s/early 1960s.

The principal relationship in the film is that between Machin and Margaret Hammond, the widow with whom he lodges. Mrs Hammond’s husband has been killed in an industrial accident in the engineering factory owned by the rugby league club’s chairman, Gerald Weaver, leaving her with two small children. The direct cause of his death is unclear, although Weaver later tells Machin, perhaps maliciously, that it is believed that he committed suicide to escape his wife. The relationship between Machin and Mrs Hammond is frosty, fraught and almost entirely uncomfortable, even when he falls in love with her, and eventually results in him violently raping her. As Lindsay Anderson later described it, this is an ‘impossible story of a fatally mismatched couple’ (Anderson, 1986)

Although this is not highlighted in the film as prominently as it is in the novel, Mrs Hammond (she is almost never referred to by her first name) is clearly significantly older than Frank, who would appear to be in his early twenties. Her life experience, much of it tragic, is clearly something that the much younger Frank does not understand and the cause of much of his frustration and subsequent violence towards her. Their age difference is something that clearly falls outside of what is deemed to be a ‘respectable’ relationship, as can be seen by the reactions of Mrs Hammond’s neighbours to Frank, most notably when he returns home with the gift of a fur coat for her, much to the silent disgust of her visiting next-door neighbour.

Machin’s other major relationship is with, ‘Dad’ Johnson, played by William Hartnell, the club scout who arranged for him to have a trail for the team which led to him signing a contract to become a professional player. The suspicion that Johnson’s interest in Frank has a strong homo-erotic element is articulated by Mrs Hammond: ‘he ogles you. He looks at you like a girl’, she complains to Frank, who, from his reaction, is also aware of Johnson’s attraction to him. Perhaps as a consequence of this knowledge, Machin is needlessly cruel to Johnson on several occasions, taking advantage of the older man’s feelings. Johnson’s effeminacy is emphasised by Mrs Hammond again, who complains that he has soft hands, by club chairman Gerald Weaver, who calls him Frank’s ‘little dog’ and also in a scene when the players get off the team coach and pass a ball amongst themselves. It is passed to Johnson, who drops it - a sure sign of effeminacy in the intensely competitive male world of sporting prowess.

Alan Badel as Mr Weaver

Gerald Weaver himself also seems to have interests in Frank above mere rugby. Gloriously played by Alan Badel, he seems to flirt with Frank, the sexual undertone mixing with the fact that, now that Frank has signed for Weaver’s team, he is Weaver’s property. Giving Frank a lift home in his car, Weaver ostentatiously puts his hand on Frank’s knee, an act that Frank clearly suspects is something rather more than mere friendliness. However, as with Miller’s use of the word ‘love’ to Machin in the earlier dance hall scene, it should be noted that this type of close physical contact, such as squeezing another man’s knee, between men of the industrial working class was, and continues to be, common in the north of England. The ambiguity of a middle-class man like Weaver making physical contact with a working-class man such as Machin raises questions not just of sexual but also class transgression.

On a personal level, Machin’s consciousness of the sexual undertone in his relationships with Weaver and Johnson may also reflect something about himself. The pin-ups in his room at Mrs Hammond’s house are all of male boxers or rugby players and the film pays particular attention to the fun Frank has in the communal plunge bath that all the players use after a match.

The fourth overtly transgressive relationship is that involving Mrs Weaver (played by Vanda Godsell), the wife of Gerald Weaver, who invites Machin to her home when her husband is at work. Like Mrs Hammond, she too is considerably older than Frank but unlike Mrs Hammond, she is sexually confident and attempts to seduce him. She fails because Frank tells her that he thinks it is unfair on Mr Weaver, an excuse that Mrs Weaver finds puzzling, suggesting that she and her husband have a non-monogamous marriage. She suspects Frank’s reticence is because he is in love with Mrs Hammond. ‘Is it the woman you live with?’ she snaps at him, to which he quickly corrects her: ‘she’s the woman I lodge with’ he says, emphasising the gulf of respectability that separates the two words.

Moreover, Frank is clearly not the first player that Mrs Weaver has invited back home. Team captain Maurice Braithwaite disparagingly calls her ‘Cleopatra’ and Arthur Lowe, playing Weaver’s rival director Charles Slomer, asks Frank about ‘what I call Mrs. Weaver's weakness for social informalities’. Moreover, the Weavers’ Christmas party that the team attends appears to resemble an orgy, something alluded to in the promotional posters for the film, which emphasised the sexual aspects of the film over its sporting ones.

In fact, all of Machin’s principal relationships in the film could be termed as sexually transgressive or potentially so, concerning either homo-erotic attraction or cross-generational heterosexual relationships. The only ‘normative’ relationship in the film is that of Maurice Braithwaite (played by Colin Blakely) and his fiance Judith (played by Anne Cunningham), whose blossoming courtship runs through the narrative, culminating in their marriage at the end of the film, presenting an oasis of respectable conformity in contrast to the complexities and frustrations of Frank’s tortured emotional life.

Conclusions

There are two key points to be made about the sexual politics of the film. The first one is that This Sporting Life presents the complexity of relationships within a working-class community in a way that had never previously happened in British film, and this in itself is an important achievement. Of course, some of the same themes can be seen in other British new wave films. For example, the figure of the older woman appears in Room at the Top and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (in which she is also played by Rachel Roberts) and homosexuality is dealt with in A Taste of Honey. However, This Sporting Life is unique in the range and complexity of the sexual relationships, both overt and implied, it portrays not only in a working-class community but also across classes.

The second point is perhaps more intellectually interesting. What is the relationship between the portrayal of sport in the film and the centrality of sex to its plot?

Lindsay Anderson and David Storey, whether consciously or not, set up the film’s shifting sexual scenario against the norms of sport. Anderson, the public-school educated gay intellectual is the outsider looking in and Storey, the working-class, rugby league-playing grammar school boy, is the insider looking out. Together, they instinctively grasped that the nature of sport is based on the reinforcement of traditional heterosexual masculinity. Sport is a masculine, aggressively heterosexual world, in which might is right and weakness punished. This is a world that Frank Machin understands. But his mastery of that world puts him at a disadvantage in the real and complicated world of sex and personal relationships. And this tension between sport and sex, I would argue, is the driving force of the film.

Although it can be argued that This Sporting Life presents an unfairly brutal and bleak portrait of rugby league - for example, no player expresses any enjoyment in playing the game - the film should be seen solely as a critique of rugby league, but of sport as a whole. Modern sport is founded on a rigid differentiation between men and women, the masculine and the feminine, the sexually normative and the transgressive. This was summed up in the Muscular Christian motto ‘Mens sana in corpore sana’ - ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’, which referred to not the creation of intellectual minds in healthy bodies, but of morally pure minds, free of the temptations of sexuality (Haley, 1990).

Tom Brown’s Schooldays, modern sport’s foundational text in which rugby and cricket were raised to the level of moral education, served as a handbook for this Muscular Christian worldview. The book explains that new boys who did not ‘fit in’ with their schoolmates would sometimes get “called Molly, or Jenny, or some derogatory feminine name” (Hughes, 1989: p. 218).  In the second part of the book Tom Brown and his best friend East are approached by “one of the miserable little pretty white-handed curly-headed boys, petted and pampered by some of the big fellows, who wrote their verses for them, taught them to drink and use bad language, and did all they could to spoil them for everything in this world and the next” (Hughes, 1989: p. 233). Unprovoked, they trip him and kick him, much like Machin’s treatment of ‘Dad’ Johnson. This campaign against effeminacy and homosexuality also animated the drive to place sport at the heart of the school curriculum as a way of diverting male adolescent energies that might otherwise have taken a sexual direction (Puccio, 1995: p. 63).

The link between sport and opposition to transgressive sexual practices was highlighted by the activities of some the nineteenth century’s leading sporting figures of the time. Lord Kinnaird, president of the FA for thirty-three years, was a prominent supporter of the Central Vigilance Society for the Suppression of Immorality and the National Vigilance Society, which in 1889 was behind the jailing of an English publisher for publishing 'obscene' works by Zola and Flaubert (Sanders, 2009: p. 77). Edward Lyttleton, captain of the Cambridge University cricket team and a batsman with Middlesex, campaigned against the alleged dangers of masturbation. And of course it was the Marquess of Queensberry, one of the founders of the Amateur Athletic Association and the man after whom the laws of modern boxing are named, who was fatefully sued by Wilde in 1895 for calling him in ‘Somdomite [sic]’ (Hall and Porter, 1995: p. 144). Modern sport was founded on the most rigid imposition of conformity, social and sexual.

In contrast to this Manichean world, This Sporting Life presents the richness and complexity of sexual desire as it struggles against the oppressive conformity of gender roles and class distinction. It portrays sport as the accomplice and the instrument of sexual oppression and misery. In this way therefore, This Sporting Life could be said to be the Anti-Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

It has long been argued that sport is rarely successful in films. This Sporting Life is successful however - but that is because it is not really about sport, or rugby league, at all.

It is all about sex.

Bibliography

Campbell, James (2004) ‘A Chekhov of the North’, Guardian, 31 January, p. 31-32.

Haley, Bruce (1990) The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture, Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Hill, Jeff (2006), ‘Acting Big’: David Storey’s This Sporting Life’ in his Sport and the Literary Imagination : Essays in History, Literature, and Sport, Oxford: Peter Lang.

Hill, Jeff (2004), ‘Sport Stripped Bare: Deconstructing Working-Class Masculinity in This Sporting Life’, Men and Masculinities, Vol. 10 No. 10: pp. 1-19.

Holt, Richard (1996) 'Men and Rugby in the North', Northern Review, Vol: 4: pp. 115-123.

Hughes, Thomas (1989) Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Oxford: OUP World’s Classics edition.

Hughson, John (2005) ‘The 'Loneliness' of the Angry Young Sportsman’ Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies Vol. 35, No. 2 pp. 41-48.

Hutchings, William (1987) ‘The Work of Play: Anger and the Expropriated Athletes of Alan Sillitoe and David Storey’, Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No.1: p. 35.

Joyce, Ramon (1963) Rugby Leaguer, 15 February, p. 4.

Mansfield, Jane (2010) ‘The Brute-Hero: The 1950s and Echoes of the North’, Literature & History, Vol. 19 No. 1: p. 34-39.

Milne, Tom (1962) ‘This Sporting Life’, Sight and Sound, Vol. 31, No. 3: p. 113-116.

Observer Sport Monthly (2005) 'The Fifty Best Sports Books of all Time', 8 May: pp. 5-9.

Pittock, Malcolm (1990) ‘Revaluing the Sixties: "This Sporting Life" Revisited’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2: pp. 97-108.

Porter, Roy, and Hall, Lesley (1995) The Facts of Life, Yale: Yale University Press.

Puccio, Paul M. (1995) ‘At the Heart of Tom Brown’s Schooldays: Thomas Arnold and Christian Friendship’, Modern Language Studies, Vol. 25, No. 4: pp. 57–74.

Sanders, Richard (2009) Beastly Fury: The Strange Birth of British Football, London: Transworld.

Shafer, Stephen C. (2001) ‘An Overview of the Working Classes in British Feature Film from the 1960s to the 1980s: From Class Consciousness to Marginalization’, International Labor and Working-Class History, Vol. 59: pp. 3-14.

Solomon, R. H. (1994) ‘Man as Working Animal: Work, Class and Identity in the Plays of David Storey’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. 30, No.3: p. 193.

Spracklen, Karl (1996) ‘Playing the Ball: Constructing Community and Masculine Identity in Rugby: An analysis of the two codes of league and union and the people involved’, unpublished PhD thesis, Leeds Metropolitan University.

Storey, David (1998) Radcliffe, London, Vintage.

Storey, David (1962) This Sporting Life, London: Penguin.

Yorkshire Federation of RL Supporters’ Clubs [YFRLSC] (1963) annual conference minutes, 15 June.

Whatever it was, it wasn't a field goal...

There's been some dispute about whether Shaun Johnson's match-winning drop-goal for New Zealand against England at Huddersfield on Saturday was actually a goal. Whether it went between the posts or not, it certainly wasn't a 'field goal', as claimed in the Guardian.

The 'field goal' had a long history in rugby. It was a specific type of goal in which a rolling ball on the ground was hacked over the bar and between the posts. It was always controversial because it was usually scored more by luck than by skill.

But by the end of the nineteenth century the game had moved on from the wild kicking that was sometimes a feature of early rugby and the field goal had become almost extinct. Rugby Union's International Board abolished it in March 1905, coincidentally a month before the last field goal was scored in a major rugby league match, when Hull KR centre Billy Phipps kicked one in Rovers' 1905 Challenge Cup semi-final win over Broughton Rangers.

It didn't completely disappear from league. The 1922-23 RFL Official Guide notes that a query had been raised the previous season about whether a goal could be scored by a player kicking a loose ball over the cross bar and between the posts. The RFL ruled that it would be counted as a field goal. (Interestingly, in the summer of 1922 the RFL had abolished the 'goal from a mark' whereby a player could catch the ball, make a mark and then kick a drop goal.)

It wasn't until 1950 that the Rugby Football League - acknowledged at that time as the final arbiter of all rule disputes - finally struck  the field goal from the rule book. But in Australia a field goal meant a drop goal.

This anomaly was raised on the 1954 Lions tour of Australia by the managers of the tourists, Hector Rawson and Tom Hesketh. They discussed the matter at an Australian Board of Control meeting in Sydney on 11 June 1954.

The minutes of the meeting state that: ‘The RFL wrote advising that attention had been drawn to the fact that in a recent match played in Sydney the total of one side was made up of four tries, three goals and a field-goal. When the the laws of the game were re-written several years ago, the field-goal was abolished and it is now stated quite definitely that a goal can only be scored from a conversion of a try, from a penalty goal and from a dropped goal. It would appear that perhaps the press had referred to the latter as a field goal. It was decided that it was the considered opinion of the Board that a field-goal represents a dropped goal from the field of play and we are of the opinion that no great harm would come from people referring to a drop kick by a player going over the cross bar and between the posts, as a field-goal. (proposed by SG Ball and Ron McAuliife)’.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this wasn't good enough for RFL secretary Bill Fallowfield. He complained about Australian terminology at an RFL Council meeting on 12 November 1954:’The Secretary reported that it had come to his notice that the field-goal i.e. the kicking of a loose ball over the cross bar, was still allowed in Australia and New Zealand. It was agreed unanimously that the attention of Australia and New Zealand be drawn to the fact that the field-goal was deleted from the laws of the game when they were rewritten in 1950’.

This difference in terminology for a drop-kicked goal existed well before it was raised by the British tour managers. On the 1946 Lions tour many of the match programmes for games in the country areas carried a description of the rules of the game, 'Helpful Hints to those on the Touchline', which stated that 'a player can drop kick a field-goal while play is in progress and his team is awarded two points’.

It's unclear why a drop-goal became known as a field-goal in Australia, but it has become fashionable in British league to use the Australian term. But it's terminologically incorrect.

It’s unlikely that the term has been borrowed from American football, where the NFL categorised drop-kicked goals separately from ‘field goals’ until 1963. The field-goal in the gridiron game today refers to any goal that is not a point-after conversion, so a drop-goal is regarded as the same as a place-kicked goal. If America was the source of the use of 'field-goal', logic would mean that it also includes goals scored from penalty kicks (which, incidentally are not 'penalty goals’ in rugby league, as they are sometimes called by some parts of the media, but simply ‘goals’). 

The drop-goal is not something that regularly troubles the NFL's scorers, as only New England's Doug Flutie has kicked one in the last seventy-five years. You can see it here - and at least we can be certain that the ball went between the posts. 

The Past, Present and Future of the Scrum

-- This is the transcript of the keynote presentation I gave to the Rugby Union World Cup conference held in September 2015 at the University of Brighton.

In the beginning was the scrum. 

The scrum is a common feature of almost all pre-modern football games. It was an essential part of the mass football games played between villages or districts, in which hundreds of men would struggle endlessly for possession of the ball. 

But it was also a vital part of the types of football played at English public schools in the mid- nineteenth century, from which the modern football codes of association (soccer) and rugby are directly descended. 

For example, at Eton school (which the sociologist Eric Dunning claims, in my view incorrectly, as the progenitor of soccer) there were two types of football, the wall game and the field game. The wall game resembles a continuous scrum played against a wall.

Eton Field Game 'Bully'

The Eton field game is more open, but the scrum - called a ‘Bully’ - is still a central part of the game. At Winchester school, again traditionally seen as an ancestor of soccer, the scrum, which is known as a ‘hot’ is also a central part of the game. 

In fact, the scrum was common to all mid-nineteenth century codes of football, including American football, where it evolved into the scrimmage, and even Australian Rules, where it had died out largely by the 1880s.

The scrum at Rugby

But in the football played at Rugby school, the scrum was the central feature of the game. As can be seen from the account of the game in Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays (published in 1857), rugby was a game of continual scrummaging. Play revolved around scrummaging and kicking to set up scrums. Handling the ball was severely limited and running with ball in hand was only permitted if the ball was bouncing when it was picked up - even a rolling ball could not be picked up by hand. At this stage in its development, it would not be accurate to describe Rugby football as a ‘handling code’ of football. 

Most players took part in the scrum, with the aim of pushing the scrum towards their opponents’ goal or to the dribble the ball forward to the opposition goal line. Forwards in the scrum stood upright and pushed, kicking the ball or their opponents’ shins (‘hacking’). Putting one’s head down in a scrum was seen as an act of cowardice because it implied that that the player was concerned for his own safety.

A scrummage at Rugby School in the 1840s.

As in soccer, forwards were the attacking players and their role was to drive the opposing scrummagers as far back as possible and then capitalise on their disarray by dribbling the ball. Backs were the defensive players, whose role was to defend the goal or kick the ball to set up another scrum. The idea that the forwards would deliberately heel the ball out of the scrum for the backs would be seen as cheating, or even worse, as cowardice. 

In 1871 the English Rugby Football Union was formed and it amended Rugby school rules to make the game more acceptable for adult players. For example it banned hacking and simplified scoring. But the scrum retained its importance. RFU secretary Arthur Guillemard described the workings of the scrum in 1877, explaining that as soon as the ball-carrying player was brought to the ground with a tackle, 

the forwards of each side hurry up and a scrummage is instantly formed, each ten facing their opponents’s goal, packed round the ball, shoulder to shoulder, leg to leg, as tight as they can stand, the twenty thus forming a round compact mass with the ball in the middle. Directly the holder of the ball has succeeded in forcing it down to the ground, he shouts ‘Down’ and business may be commenced at once.

In this description one can see both the origins of American football’s use of the term ‘down’ for a completed tackle and the antecedent of rugby league’s play the ball rule. 

But the centrality of the set-piece scrum to the early game inevitably led to problems. This was due to some extent to the fact that grown men were playing a game that had been originally developed by and for adolescent schoolboys. A scrum made up of varyingly sized youths was a very different proposition to one comprising heavy, mature men. Also, adult clubs were committed to winning and that meant that tactics were developed to ensure victory, or to avoid defeat at the very least. 

The difficulties could be seen in this description of a typical scrum of the early 1870s by England and Richmond forward Charles Gurdon: 

It would last, if skilfully manoeuvred (as we then thought), ten minutes or more, sometimes swaying this way, sometimes that; and on special occasions, when one side was much heavier than the other, this rotund mass would gravitate safely and unbroken, some thirty or forty yards towards the goal line of the weaker side, leaving a dark muddy track to mark its course.

‘Straight ahead propulsion’ was the primary tactic used in the scrum. Sometimes the most central forward would grip the ball between his feet while his fellow-forwards concentrated on pushing him through the opposing pack of forwards, allowing him to dribble the ball forward once they had broken through their opponents. 

There were generally few opportunities for backs, not least because there were so few of them. In a team of fifteen or twenty, there would be two full-backs, two half-backs and one three-quarter, although two three-quarters gained popularity in the mid-1870s. The rest would be forwards. Passing the ball was extremely rare. 

Reforming the Game

By 1875 these tendencies had brought rugby to an impasse:  

How much longer are we to be wearied by monotonous shoving matches instead of spirited scrummages, and disgusted at seeing a 14 stone Hercules straining every muscle to move an opposing mountain of flesh a yard or two further from his goal-line, whilst he is all the time blissfully oblivious of the fact that ball is lying undisturbed at his feet

asked the London newspaper Bell’s Life.

To solve these problems, proposals were raised to lower the number of players in a team to fifteen. In 1875 the Oxford versus Cambridge varsity match was first played fifteen-a-side and the following season international matches became fifteen-a-side, although strangely the law was not formally changed until 1892. 

The move to fifteen-a-side led to a number of structural alterations to the way the game was played. Scrums no longer lasted for minutes, because it was easier for the ball to come out of the scrum. Forwards now started to put their heads down in the scrum to see where the ball was. The frequency with which the ball now came out from the scrum meant that forwards began to look for opportunities to break away and dribble the ball downfield independently. And the danger of a forward breaking away with the ball at his feet meant that a third three-quarter had to be added in order to defend against the quick breakaway. 

Moreover, and to the horror of traditionalists who tried unsuccessfully to persuade the RFU to outlaw the practice, teams began to deliberately heel the ball out of the scrum to the backs. Wheeling the scrum also emerged as a tactic, as teams with an extra player in the scrum, following the withdrawal of an opposing forward to the three-quarter line, realised that they could turn the weaker set of forwards around. 

'A Match at Football: The Last Scrimmage' 1871.

Above all, the change opened the way for the development of the passing game. The speed with which the ball left the scrum and the ease with which forwards could peel away from the pack offered a quick-thinking half-back the chance to move the ball quickly out to his three-quarter or loose forward. 

The process was helped significantly in 1878 when the rules were changed so that a tackled player was forced to release the ball immediately the tackle was completed. This meant that forwards now had to keep up with the play, rather than take their time to get to the scrum, increasing their fitness and expanding the available space on the field. 

Facilitated by these rule changes and spurred by the tremendous growth in the popularity of the game, the 1880s became a decade of innovation. The Welsh invented the four three-quarter system and the scoring system was changed to allow points to be awarded for tries and goals - previously matches were won, as in soccer, by the team that scored most goals, regardless of tries. 

In the north of England, Thornes. a team from a mining village near Wakefield, won the Yorkshire Cup in 1882, they did so thanks to revolutionary scrum tactics, such as using a wing- forward to protect their scrum-half, heeling the ball out of the scrum quickly, and allocating specific positions in the scrum and line-out to their forwards, anticipating the 1905 All Blacks by a generation. 

But many of these changes were not welcomed by senior figures in English rugby. RFU president Arthur Budd regretted the increased importance of tries:

the very fact that try-getters are plentiful while goal-droppers are scarce shows that the latter art is very much more difficult of acquirement. Now this being so, why, I should like to ask, ought the more skilful piece of play to be depreciated, while a premium is placed on mere speed of foot?’ 

In 1896 he even proposed that heeling the ball out of the scrum should be made illegal.

On the other side were those who thought the changes had not gone far enough. In 1892, James Miller, the president of the Yorkshire Rugby Union, argued that rugby: 

had now reached a period when another radical change must be considered, and that was the reduction of players from fifteen to thirteen. ... the end of the ‘pushing age’ had been reached and instead of admiring the physique and pushing power of those giants which took part in the game in the early stages, in the future they would be able to admire the skilful and scientific play of the game.

So, we can see the emergence of two different conceptions of how rugby should be played. Although the 1895 split in English rugby was caused by the issue of payments to players, it also broadly reflected this division over how rugby should be played. 

Rugby League and the scrum

Within two weeks of the split, the Northern Union discussed moving to thirteen a side.The rationale, explained Leeds’ official Harry Sewell, was that

we want to do away with that scrummaging, pushing and thrusting game, which is not football, and that is why I propose to abolish the line-out and reduce the number of forwards to six. The football public does not pay to see a lot of scrummaging…

But his proposal to move to six forwards in thirteen-a-side teams was voted down, and over the next decade the number of scrums in rugby league grew dramatically. In 1899, in an attempt to get rid of messy rucks and mauls, the NU introduced a rule that if a tackled player could not release the ball, a set scrum had to be formed - an example of which can be seen below from the 1901 Oldham versus Swinton match. 

These rule changes led to matches like Hunslet’s 1902 match with Halifax in which there were 110 scrums. In fact, the set scrum now had more importance in the rugby league game than in the rugby union. It was claimed by many that the excessive number of scrums in the game was turning young players towards soccer. 

Eventually, in June 1906, the NU reduced the number of players to thirteen-a-side. And to solve the problem of endless scrummaging, it also introduced a new rule for playing the ball after a tackle. Now, instead of a scrum being formed, the tackled player was allowed to get to his feet, put the ball down in front of him and play it with his foot, usually to a team mate standing behind him.

This was a conscious decision to return to the modified principles of the original form of rugby scrum, whereby the tackled forward would place the ball down on the ground before the scrum commenced, albeit with only one opposition player directly in front of him.

Rugby Union and the scrum

The classic New Zealand 2-3-2 scrum formation.

After the split, the RFU was unchallenged in its ideas about the centrality of the scrum. But it was a different matter when facing teams from New Zealand and Australia. The 1905 All Blacks were heavily criticised for their seven man scrum and a free-standing wing-forward or ‘rover’, who fed the scrum and shielded his scrum-half to allow quicker passing of the ball from the base of the scrum. It was felt by many in England that the wing-forward was unsportsmanlike at best and downright illegal at worst. 

The All Blacks’ forwards packed down in the scrum in a 2-3-2 formation, with two men in the front row, three in the second and two in the third, with the wing-forward where the scrum-half would traditionally stand at the side of the scrum. The system was believed to allow more focused pushing and also, because the scrum-half was protected, to facilitate quick ball from the scrum. 

This method of opening up play from the scrum was very similar to that of the Northern Union, which in its first season had banned the defending scrum-half from going beyond his own front row until his opposite number had taken the ball from the scrum, thus providing more time to get the ball to the backs. 

The controversy came to a head on the 1930 British Isles tour to Australasia. At an official dinner British manager James Baxter implied that Cliff Porter, the All Black captain who played as a rover, was a cheat. The fact that the British lost the test series 3-1 to New Zealand may also have exacerbated Baxter’s antipathy. On his return he had little difficulty in persuading the RFU to change the scrummage rules to effectively outlaw the wing-forward and the 2-3-2 formation.

Ironically, despite the RFU’s criticisms of All Black scrummaging methods, the England national side won four grand slams in the 1920s playing a power forward game inspired by the All Blacks. The architect of this success was William Wavell Wakefield, who brought a tactical planning to scrum play that had not previously be seen in English rugby union. The power of his teams was based on having back-rowers (known as ‘winging-forwards’ to distinguish them from the New Zealand detached roving wing-forwards) who could cover every inch of ground whether in defence or attack. Essentially it was the birth of the modern flanker. 

But by the mid-1930s Wakefield’s innovations had led to matches became dominated by defensive back-row play. As Howard Marshall pointed out, ‘Defence overcame orthodox attack, and the decay of real scrummaging set in.’ The back-row forward had, he complained, ‘got somewhat out of hand’. The desire to receive or stop quick ball from the scrum led to interminable problems in putting the ball into the scrum, as front rows sought to stop their opponents getting the ball, and the keenness of the back-rowers to close down the half-backs led to constant penalties for off-side. The combination of back-row dominance and rule-changes designed to re-assert the centrality of the scrum meant that try-scoring dried up. 

The game continued to be oppressed by forward domination and kicking throughout the 1950s. BBC radio commentator G.V. Wynne-Jones even called for the number of forwards to be reduced to six. The International Board made significant changes to the rules in 1954 to stop the deliberate collapsing of the scrum. It returned to the rules again in 1958, once more to reform the scrum and to speed up play through a variety of minor measures. But far from opening up the game, the IB reforms added to the problem, not least by significantly adding to the technicalities of the scrum. 

It was not coincidence that the French, frustrated with their failure to win the Five Nations despite the strength of their club competition, finally found success in 1959 by emulating English forward play, rather than by playing the open game that supposedly marked the essence of the Gallic game. Scrum work, argued the French rugby writer Denis Lalanne, was the basis for winning rugby:

we know where rugby begins and where it must begin all over again. It certainly does not begin in the back row. It begins in the FRONT ROW. [emphasis in original].

And so it remained until the 1980s. The great French sides of the 1960s and 1970s were based on this very principal. But the advent of the World Cup and then professionalism gave rise to new problems that would undermine the centrality of the scrum to rugby union. 

Modern League

The continuing importance of the scrum to rugby league can be seen in the fact that the first major gathering of rugby league officials after the First World War was a special conference in 1921 to discuss the problems of scrums. Not only was it felt that there were too many - with an average of between fifty and sixty a match - but hookers (a title which was just coming into common parlance, in preference to striker or centre-forward), props and scrum-halves were all criticised for refusing to obey the rules of the scrum.

The problem continued to occur throughout the interwar years. There were rule changes to prevent the more obvious reasons for scrum problems, such as the 1930 rule forcing forwards to pack down with three in the front row, two in the second row and a loose forward binding the second row - designed to prevent teams having four in the front row and unbalancing the scrum - and the 1932 ban on the hooker having a loose arm in the scrum.

But little changed and the debate became more intense in the late 1930s, when it was not uncommon again to see matches of between eighty and a hundred scrums. Indeed, rule-breaking was almost inherent in the very nature of the scrum - when former Wallaby hooker Ken Kearney arrived to play for Leeds in 1948 he asked a referee what were the best tactics to use in English scrums. ‘Cheat’ was the one-word reply he allegedly, but quite believably, received.

The seemingly never-ending cycle of clampdown, dismissals and eventual reassertion of the norm continued into the 1970s when the introduction of limited tackle rugby league in 1966 meant that struggle for possession, and consequently scrums, lost much of its previous importance. Indeed, the technical problems of the scrum were gradually solved by the expedient of allowing, albeit informally, the scrum-half to feed the ball to his own forwards.

In 1983 a handover of the ball to the opposing side, rather than a scrum, was introduced when the attacking side was tackled in possession on the sixth tackle. The final break with the past came with a series of changes in the early 1990s to the play-the-ball rule that removed the last vestiges of the struggle for possession and made it simply a device for restarting play. 

Not the shape of things to scrum: Wigan v Bath 1996.

The future of the scrum

The advent of professionalism in rugby union in 1995 was accompanied by continuous attempts to improve the game as a spectacle, from the legalisation of lifting in the line-out to tinkering with the ruck and the maul in order to ensure quicker ball and more continuous play. The scrum has come under particular scrutiny.

I would argue that the reason for this intense scrutiny of the rules of the game, and especially of the scrum, is because professionalism has renewed rugby union’s evolutionary impulse. The impact of commercialism, a century after it had originally shut the door on radical change, is taking union down the same road that league has traveled. 

League had evolved on a trial and error basis by providing answers to the traditional problems of those football codes that had emerged from the rules of football at Rugby School - just like American and other football codes. The problem of the breakdown, or what to do when the player with the ball had been tackled, had been solved by replacing the ruck or the maul with the orderly play-the-ball. Excessive touch kicking had been curbed by penalizing direct kicking into touch. The domination of the forwards had been diminished by reducing the number of forwards and cutting the opportunities for scrummaging. 

Moreover, experience had led league to gradually abandon the idea of the struggle for possession of the ball, and thus reduce the importance of the scrum. As professionalism and the importance of winning had become paramount, it discovered, as union has begun to, that no matter how detailed the rules of the scrum or the breakdown, players and coaches would always find a way to circumvent or undermine them. In its place, league had evolved into a struggle for territory and position. 

Rugby union is now faced with a paradox. The symbolism of the scrum has increased in the past two decades as many of its traditional shibboleths - such as amateurism - have disappeared. The supercharged collision of the two front rows to begin the scrum is itself a new phenomenon, unknown to earlier front rows, for whom the struggle would begin as the two packs bound themselves together. 

Yet, ironically, the importance of the scrum to the playing of the modern game is rapidly diminishing. In the 2011 Rugby World Cup the average number of scrums per match was just seventeen, compared to twenty-seven in the 1995 tournament and thirty-one in internationals staged in 1983. The 2015 6Nations and 2014 Rugby Championship saw just 12 - roughly the same number as in league.  Moreover, the ‘contest for possession’ is also steadily declining in importance - the leading international sides now retain possession at the scrum and the line-out 85%-90% of the time. In 2005, the IRB discovered that the side in possession retained the ball thirteen out of fourteen times at the breakdown.

What’s the solution to the problem of the rugby union scrum? More yellow cards for scrum offences? Already tried in RL - and failed.

There is no answer - the scrum will whither, but it will not die. Rugby of both codes is too rooted in its traditions, culture and belief systems. Logic is not necessarily a determining factor in rugby decision-making. But the importance of the scrum will continue to decline, until it becomes, like the human coccyx, an almost redundant vestigial reminder of the evolutionary past of rugby, and indeed of all football codes.

1930: The 'Daily Worker' debates the rugby codes

In September 1930 a short but vigorous debate broke out about the two rugby codes in the pages of the Daily Worker, the recently established daily of the Communist of Great Britain (CPGB). To my knowledge, it is the only time that the ostensibly Marxist left ever discussed the rugby split.

Fascists Who Play Rugby. A Game Where Snobbery Reigns Unchallenged.
    The Rugby code of football has built up for itself a reputation for ‘snobbery’. When we analyse this, however, we find that it truly reflects the type who play the game.
    Strike-breakers, little business-men and middle-class ruffians in general form the nucleus of the players of the game.
    We have already drawn attention to the unsavoury reputation the English touring side in Australia has earned for itself [this refers to the British Isles team that toured Australia and New Zealand in the summer of 1930]. Incidents at banquets, and scathing press articles show the said to be the typical ‘gentlemanly’ one.
    A recent report, following their defeat by New South Wales by 23 points to 3, says that one English player said after the match, ‘I never want to see a football again’.
    No doubt the round of gaiety is beginning to pall, and the lads, limited in intellectual ability as they are, are no doubt extremely unhappy. Fortunately they have nice jobs to return to, unlike many of our worker sportsmen who, on their return from the USSR or the continent, are sacked for taking parts in workers’ sport.
University Loafers
Let us have a look at some of the ornaments of rugby. Irish internationals of last season include E.F. de Verre Hunt, of the Army, and G. Beamish, of the RAF. Most of the 29 men who represented Scotland last year are university loafers, whilst Bassett and Hollingdale, Welsh ‘caps’, are in the police force.    
    Of about 120 [of] last season’s internationals, almost 50 per cent served, and they are very proud of it, as ‘assistants of the Crown’ at the time of the General Strike in 1926.
    In the Services, Rugby is the acknowledged game for the officers, whilst ‘soccer’ is the game for the proletariat - literally, ‘gun-fodder’.
    Next time you see a Rugby game just pick out the ‘blacklegs’ you know. You will get more enjoyment out of it than is usually the case in the game of ‘kick and rush’.

- - Daily Worker, 12 September 1930

Northern Union and Rugby Union. Two Similar Codes With Very Different Followers.
    A letter has been received from Comrade Bob Davies of Warrington concerning Rugby League (Northern Union) football. He says:
    In the article entitled ‘Fascists Who Play Rugby’, I think you should be careful to make a distinction between the Rugby Union code and the Rugby League code. Your remarks in the main do not apply to the latter, where the big majority of the players are manual workers and do not give up their work when they become regular paid players.
    The sum paid to players in the Rugby League varies but on the average I should think is about £2 per match and no summer wages.
    It is true that among the Rugby League players there are some who would act as strike-breakers, for example Sullivan, the Wigan international full-back is credited, or discredited, with having tried to persuade the miners to return to work during the 1926 lockout. On the other hand I know at least three internationals who are quite close to the [Communist] Party; one was on the Wigan Local [CP branch] books for some time.
Not A ‘Swank’ Sport
Of course, all the general criticism made against capitalist sport applies to the Rugby League, but it is certainly not a ‘gentleman’s’ sport. The Rugby Union has no connection with the Rugby League and the Rugby League supporters regard the Rugby Union with a great amount of contempt.
    In conclusion, I think the Daily [Worker] should give a little space weekly to the Rugby League, because in certain areas of Lancashire and Yorkshire Rugby is the most popular game. In St Helens, Widnes, Warrington, Leigh and Wigan there is very little support for soccer, yet all have one or more first-class Rugby League teams.
    [Sports editor: We quite agree that the distinction between the Northern Union and the Rugby Union codes should have been made clearer in the article in question. It will be noticed, however, that only Rugby Union players were mentioned in that article. 
    In our opinion the Northern Union code is far superior as a game to the snobbish, ‘posh’ Rugby of the Rugby Union. As to the players in it, they are, we agree, in the main, workers and cannot be compared with the swagger fascists who play Rugby in London and the South. The game itself is only open to the same degree of criticism as is professional soccer and all other boss-class sport.
    We shall willingly publish news and comments on Northern Union games. Will our St Helens comrades help us to obtain the same?]

- - Daily Worker, 17 September 1930

Harry Jepson 1920-2016: A Life in Rugby League

In 2009 I was lucky enough to be able to spend almost two hours talking to Harry Jepson about his long life in rugby league. The interview covered his entire career in the game, from his first memories of going to see Hunslet in the early 1920s, through his career as a Hunslet official and on to his second career at Leeds.

Along the way he remembers the great matches and players of the past, going to Wembley when Hunslet won the cup in 1934 (an event also recounted in Richard Hoggart's classic book The Uses of Literacy), the Second World War, relations with rugby union, the influx of Australian players in the 1980s and much, much more. 

It was probably the best two hours I've ever spent as a historian of rugby. The interview was part of project that sadly never saw the light of day. When I got the news that Harry had died on Monday, I spent some time watching it again. I've uploaded the video here in its entirety, unedited and still with timestamps and video artefacts. I hope it is a tribute that gives the full measure of this remarkable man and his wonderful life. 

Harry Jepson: Farewell to the last living link with 1895

Harry Jepson died on Monday aged 96 after a lifetime of service to his community as a teacher and as a coach, official and mentor to rugby league. He died, if a death can ever said to be fall appropriately, on the anniversary of the founding of the Northern Union on 29 August.

Harry was born in 1920 in Hunslet and became a fan of his local team Hunslet at a very young age. Along with Richard Hoggart, who was in the same class, he attended Cockburn High School and went on to became a teacher, rising to be deputy head at Clapgate School. He learned French at school and was one of the few people to be able to speak to Jean Galia in his own language when the pioneering French rugby league tourists visited Leeds in 1934. You can read his full biography here.

He became secretary of Hunslet Schools Rugby League and began to work with Hunslet RLFC, becoming secretary of the club in 1963. During his time at Hunslet he got to know the legendary Albert Goldthorpe and worked closely other officials of the club, such as Joe Lewthwaite, who had been personally involved in the 1895 split that established the Northern Union. 

In the late-1960s he was head-hunted by Leeds to become their de-facto football manager and he played a central role in reshaping the club, eventually becoming club president.

In 2008 I sat down with him for a compelling two-hour conversation about his life and his memories of rugby league for a planned DVD. Sadly the project never came to fruition but I still have the tapes. Below are two short extracts (complete with timecode stamp!); in the first he describes what the phrase "Best int' Northern Union" means and in the second he describes going to see the great Harold Wagstaff. 

I'm in the process of editing the full interview - stand by for an announcement shortly!

Harry Jepson explains the meaning of 'Best int' Northern Union".

Harry Jepson describes going to se e Harodl Wagstaff play in the 1920s.

Roger Millward 1947-2016

- - Tonight Rugby League Cares hosts the Rugby League Hall of Fame tribute to Roger Millward and Mick Sullivan, two Hall of Famers who died this year. Unfortunately I won't be able to make it, so I'm posting my obituary to Roger that appeared in the May 2016 edition of Forty20.

How do you know when you have finally grown up? Of course, you can leave school at 16 and vote at 18, both of which officially admit you into the adult world. And there are other landmarks too. Leaving home. Moving in with a partner. Having kids and getting a mortgage.

But the ties of childhood linger deep into adulthood, and the moment of change is hard to identify. Musical tastes, TV shows, even food extend long into the decades of life. And for many men and women, the sporting experiences of childhood burn so bright that they never depart. The club you support, the matches you remember, and the players you idolised bind you to your formative past, when the world was new and the future was limitless.

For me, growing up in Hull in the 1960s, Roger Millward was the player I idolised. My dad took me to see Hull KR a few days after my eighth birthday. We’d already gone to a couple of Hull Dockers’ matches before just to see if I enjoyed going to a match. I did and, just as my grandad had taken him to Rovers in the 1940s and his dad had taken him before World War One, on 11 October 1969 we went to see Rovers play Featherstone Rovers.

I’d already heard about Roger. The were other boys at school who were Rovers’ fans and Roger was the player they talked about most. He didn’t do much in this match however. Most of the attention was on Cyril Kellett, Rovers’ former full back who was making his first appearance at Craven Park after transferring to his hometown club. But every time Roger got the ball, there seemed to be a fraction of a second when the crowd held its breath, waiting to see what he would do.

Roger Millward, with ball, captains the 1973-74 Hull KR side.

I was hooked. Not just on the game but on being a part of the crowd. It was an experience that I’d never experienced before. The sense of camaraderie. The quick-fire wit. The reminiscing. The complaining. The women with bee-hive hair-do’s who I’d never met before who insisted on feeding me sweets. The fact my dad seemed to know most of the people in the crowd. And best of all, the collective joy when Rovers scored.

From then on, my dad started taking me to every home match. ‘What will Roger do this time?’ became the question I’d ask every time we started out to match. 

The answer was pretty much everything. Roger was a master of all the arts of rugby league. A geometrically-perfect passer of the ball. A laser-like kicking game. A sense of anticipation that bordered on the clairvoyant. And a turn of speed that could take him through the narrowest crack in an opposition defence.

His stats don’t really tell the story. 207 tries and 607 goals in 406 games for Rovers are the candles on a multi-layered career. He first lit up the game as a teenager in an ITV-broadcast amateur competition in the early 1960s. He was snapped up by Castleford in 1964, his hometown club, but when it became clear that great Alan Hardisty was the first-choice stand-off, he transferred to Rovers in 1966.

In no time at all he became the idol of the fans. He was simply the best player ever to play for the club. What’s more, he was quite possibly then the best player in the world - which, at a time when the club was struggling to rebuild the team, was a source of immense pride to all Rovers’ supporters. 

What made him such a great player was more than his command of all of the skills of the sport. His greatest attribute was an intuitive sense of how the game was unfolding and what was going to happen next. In attack he could anticipate a gap and race through it or pass to someone else to burst into it. When a team-mate made a break, Roger would time a run to pick up an off-load that would leave his opponents flat-footed. And in defence, he seemed to be able to predict opponents’ moves before they knew themselves, picking off passes that often led to spectacular interception tries.

He commanded the pitch with an authority that very few players had. Alex Murphy led by charisma and the arrogance of unlimited ability. Wally Lewis was a general leading his troops from the front, never retreating. But Roger was a chess grandmaster, always several moves ahead of everyone else, ready to attack at the slightest sign of weakness. It’s difficult to think of an equivalent today - maybe the closest would be if Jonathan Thurston was the same size as Rob Burrow.

Roger was probably at the height of his powers playing for Great Britain against Australia. The unforgettable second test of the 1970 Ashes tour saw him brought into the side and score twenty points to level the series, and then scoring the try that sealed the third test win to bring home the Ashes for the last time. He became as feared by the Aussies as much as he was by Rovers’ club opponents.

There was no satellite TV in those days and we had to wait until the following week to see the highlights on Grandstand. Like every other Rovers’ fan I felt an enormous sense of pride that our Roger had won the Ashes. Eddie Waring’s commentary on the try that sealed the third test - ‘Millward, MILL-waaaard!’ - is seared into my memory.

But perhaps his greatest achievement was as the architect of Rovers’ gilded age between 1977 and 1986. He took over as coach in the most harrowing of circumstances when Rovers’ great Harry Poole dropped dead of a heart attack in 1977. Supported by the equally astute Colin Hutton, Roger built on Harry’s foundations to win everything, including the famous 1980 all-Hull Challenge Cup final and three championships. In the early 1980s he tried to persuade the board to make the players full-time as a way of building for the future. They disagreed, and shortly after Maurice Lindsay took Wigan full-time and built one of the great dynasties of the game.

In 1980 I left school and went to Warwick University, so I became a long-distance supporter. But even in the rugby league deserts that I lived in, I found that people had heard of Roger, partly through Eddie Waring’s nicknaming him Roger the Dodger, but mostly because they had seen his incredible skills on TV. The first time I went to Australia, a taxi driver asked where I was from. When I told him Hull, he said ‘Roger Millward’s town’. Going through Auckland airport security on another visit, the guard made a crack about the losing British Lions union side. ‘I’m leaguie so it doesn’t matter to me,’ I said, at which he confessed he was too. Roger’s name once again cropped up as he frisked me down. 

When he coached Rovers for the last time in 1991 and came onto the pitch to take the applause from the crowd, tears flowed freely from me and many other fans. It was more than the closing of an era for the club, it seemed like the end of our relationship with Roger. He was leaving us, and a little part of each of our pasts had gone too. 

He had a season coaching Halifax but his heart didn’t seem to be in it. Although he had had many disagreements with Rovers’ directors over the years, he was so inextricably linked to East Hull that in many ways he was Rovers. Once he left, his magic deserted him.

I was lucky enough to meet him several times in later life, most notably when he was inducted into the Rugby League Hall of Fame in 2000. More than once, I found myself thinking ‘I’m talking to Roger Millward!’ as if I was eight again. He became a school caretaker in Kippax, and I often wondered if the kids at the school, which included a young Ryan Hall, realised that Mr Millward was one of the greatest footballers of any code anywhere in the world. I’m not sure Roger even appreciated how good he was - he was just an ordinary bloke blessed with a very extraordinary talent.

And now he’s gone. A man who had been a formative part of my life, the player who more than anyone else showed me the magic of rugby league. He died just a few weeks after my dad went into a home due to Alzheimer’s disease. He doesn’t remember much now, but he still asks how Rovers are doing. I haven’t told him that Roger’s dead yet. The two events seem to mark the final severing of the ties that connected me to my eight year old self.

And I‘m not sure that want to grow up yet.

England, Great Britain, Northern Union. What's in a (rugby league) name?

For those rugby league supporters who haven't been paying attention, a quick glance at the history of international league will show that the national team organised by the Rugby Football League has changed its name several times over the past century or so. Now known as England, at various times the same team has been known as the Northern Union and Great Britain.

Indeed, on some occasions England and Great Britain have both played matches against the same touring national side. And Welshmen such as Jim Sullivan and Gus Risman have captained England. To unravel the knotty nomenclature of the national side, we have to take a step back into the history of international rugby league.

First internationals

The first rugby league international was played on 5 April 1904 between England and Other Nationalities at Central Park Wigan. Originally it had been planned for New Year’s Day but had been postponed due to severe frost. The Other Nationalities' side consisted largely of Welshmen and a couple of Scots.

It was also a twelve-a-side match, staged as part of the Northern Union’s experiments to find the best way to play rugby. A couple of years later, the game as a whole moved from fifteen-a-side to thirteen-a-side. In fact, the next England international, in 1906, was played under fifteen-a-side rules.

So far, so simple.

But in 1907 rugby league began to expand to the Southern Hemisphere, and in September 1907 Albert Baskerville’s New Zealand tourists arrived in Britain. And things started to get more complicated.

A collection of Great Britain v New Zealand programmes. But the top right one is for the 1947 1st Test 'The Rugby Football League v New Zealand'.

The All Golds - originally a derogatory title but one which came to be seen as a badge of honour - played test matches not against England or Great Britain, but against a side called ‘the Northern Union’. The NU side was selected from the best players in Britain.

The term test match came from cricket and it was seen as the ultimate ‘test’ of a nation’s sporting prowess. 

However, the New Zealanders also played matches against England and Wales. These were not considered test matches but ‘representative’ matches, similar to county matches. During the same season England played Wales for the first time, with the Red Dragons winning 35-18.

England, Which England?

In 1908 the first Kangaroos toured Britain and in 1910 the British toured Australia and New Zealand for the first time. The touring party was officially known as the Northern Union. But most newspapers down under referred to the side as England, despite the fact the Welsh players were also in the side.

However, from 1924 the Northern Union test match team was officially named England. In 1922 the Northern Union had changed its name to the Rugby Football League and clearly the test team had to change its name too.

This meant there were two sides known as England, because England and Wales, and France from 1934, still played each other in non-test internationals. 

The fact that Welsh players turned out for the England side and that it was captained by Welshmen Jim Sullivan raised no eyebrows at the time. In fact, it was common for English national sports teams to include non-English British players.

The England rugby union side routinely included Australians and South Africans. In 1937 England were even captained by South African test cricket HG Owen-Smith. And even in recent memory, the England cricket side has been captained by the Welshman Tony Lewis and the Scotsman Mike Denness.

Even the Indomitables, the 1946 team that toured Australia and New Zealand in the immediate aftermath of World War Two were officially known as England, despite being captained by Welshman Gus Risman.

Enter Great Britain

It was only in the 1940s that this state of affairs began to be questioned. The status that the game had acquired during World War Two when its democratic image seemed to fit with the mythology of the ‘People’s War’ led to a discussion about a more inclusive name for the national side. 

The first test match of the 1947 Kiwi tour of Britain saw a new name appear. The programme for the match announced that it was between ‘The Rugby Football League v New Zealand’. But as an article in the programme explained, this was just a transitional name:

‘The appellation of the team representing the RFL has always been the subject of much controversy. All players of British nationality are eligible to play, and it seemed rather incongruous that Welshmen and Scotsmen should be invited to represent England. The Rugby League Council have decided henceforth to refer to this composite team as Great Britain.’

Bill Fallowfield went on to explain that ‘at first this new title may seem a little strange, but none can deny that it is more appropriate’. So, from the second test match of the 1947 series, the RFL’s national side was known as Great Britain.

Even then, some anomalies persisted. The England side still played in non-test matches with Wales, France and Other Nationalities. In the 1975, 1977 and 1995 world cups, England and Wales played as individual countries, while the Great Britain name was used for the other world cups, including the 1954 and 1972 wins. 

Confusingly, Great Britain matches against France were not classed as full test matches until 1957, despite Puig Aubert’s French side of the early 1950s being unarguably the best team in the world.

And back to England

Sixty years after the name had been introduced, Great Britain played its last game as the RFL’s national side. In 2008 England, Scotland and Ireland took their places in the world cup and a new era of international rugby league began.

But for those interested in the history of the international game, it only served to deepen the confusion...

Gus Risman - The Indomitable

- - On 27 April Gus Risman was inducted alongside Billy Boston as a founding member of the Welsh Rugby League Hall of Fame. In 1988 both Gus and Billy were among the nine founding members of the Rugby Football League Hall of Fame. By way of a tribute to Gus, the following is my introduction to the 2008 edition of his 1958 autobiography Rugby Renegade published by Scratching Shed.

Augustus John Ferdinand Risman was simply one of the greatest players ever to step on to a rugby pitch. No-one played at the highest level for longer. No-one led international sides for longer. Only one man played more matches. Only two men played the game to a greater age. Only two men ever scored more points. And these facts are just the bare bones of his story. 

But it is only when we compare his career to those of great athletes of other sports that we can really get a sense of the epic achievements of the man. No-one in any other code of football can approach his longevity at the top of their chosen sport. American footballer George Blanda played for twenty-six seasons, but his last five seasons was spent as a kicker, with little to do other than come onto the field to take a shot at goal. In rugby union, Newport and Wales forward George Boots played for twenty-seven seasons but his international career only lasted seven years; Risman’s lasted fourteen. Peter Shilton played soccer for thirty-one years but he of course was a goalkeeper. 

The simple truth is that in all of the football codes around the world, there is no-one who can match Risman’s record of twenty-six seasons at the very top of his sport. Gus Risman was not only unique in rugby league, he was unique in world sport. This was truly remarkable man. 

Gus was discovered playing club rugby union by Frank ‘Bucket’ Young, the great Welsh full-back who played for Leeds and toured with the first Lions in 1910. Young suggested to his former club that they might want to take a look at the young Risman but the Headingley side, with Jim Brough, the former England rugby union international, ensconced at full back, were not interested. They were also to turn down Brian Bevan just after World War Two, so Gus was in good company. In fact, the move to Salford could not have worked out better.

Under Lance Todd, a member of the pioneering 1907 New Zealand ‘All Golds’ side, Salford were one of the most attractive and innovative sides in the game during the 1930s. They were noted for their brand of sparkling attacking rugby league and featured not only Risman but great players such as Alan Edwards, Emlyn Jenkins and Barney Hudson. They won the championship three times, performed a hat-trick of Lancashire Cup wins and won the cup in 1938, which resulted in the now iconic photograph of Gus holding the cup aloft. Such was the thrilling nature of their rugby that the RFL chose Salford to be the first British club side to visit France in October 1934, where their style of play led the French press to nickname them the Red Devils.

When World War Two began Gus joined the Army, where he managed to pursue a dual career in club rugby league and forces rugby union. Salford closed down operations for the duration of the war in 1941 and the RFL allowed players to appear for any club as ‘guests’. As his army duties took him around the country, Gus turned out for Leeds, Bradford and Dewsbury, as well as making a handful of appearances for Hunslet. In 1941 he won a war-time championship medal with Bradford and the following season won the Challenge Cup with Leeds. Thanks to the lack of restrictions on players he also played for Eddie Waring’s Dewsbury team of all stars in the same season, appearing in the side that defeated Bradford in the 1942 championship final. Moreover, he made five appearances for Wales in war-time rugby league internationals.

If that wasn’t enough, he also became one of the great players of war-time rugby union too, captaining the Army and Wales in union services internationals, thanks to the RFU lifting its ban on league players in the forces for the duration of the war. In an early services’ match for the British Army against the Army in Ireland, The Times’ rugby correspondent highlighted him as the difference between the two sides - the Army in Ireland, he commented, ‘had nobody who could quite match the brilliance of Risman, the British Army’s rugby league stand-off’. By February 1942, The Times was highlighting those games in which he would make an appearance. The following month Wales beat England 17-12 in the first-ever services international: ‘the success of Wales was largely due to their captain, A.J.F. Risman, the rugby league player, who was always dangerous in attack and very dependable in defence. He scored eight points himself and was responsible for at least one of the tries.’

The accolades continued throughout the war. At the beginning of the 1942-43 season Gus was described as ‘Risman, the rugby league player whose genius has so often changed the fortunes of a game’. Service internationals continued after the war ended in 1945, most notably by a tour of the New Zealand Army which was regarded as almost a full All Black tour. The New Zealanders routed the Army 25-5 in December 1945 yet The Times could still single out Gus: ‘Risman at right centre was brilliance itself both as a runner and a kicker’. It is worth remembering that Gus’s experience of adult rugby union had ended a decade and half earlier at the age of seventeen. To be able to walk into a rugby union match with such limited experience and take complete charge was an indication of his natural genius with an oval ball.

A similar statement could be made about the next stage in his career. When he returned home from the 1946 Lions tour to Australia he was no longer a Salford player but had signed up as the player-manager of the newly formed Workington Town. Cumberland had been a bastion of rugby league since the creation of the game in 1895, supporting a successful county side and supplying dozens of top-class players to clubs in Lancashire and Yorkshire, but it wasn’t until the mid-1940s that it proved to be economically viable to establish professional sides in the county, firstly with Workington in 1945 and then Whitehaven in 1948. Gus provided both on-field leadership to the team and the charisma to give supporters belief in the side. As he recounted in Rugby Renegade, he inadvertently made himself a hostage to fortune by referring to a five-year plan when he arrived at the club, yet amazingly the side managed to win the championship in 1951 and the Challenge Cup in 1952. Of course, he played in both matches, the latter at the age of forty-one. 

But perhaps his greatest achievements took place in the test match arena. Gus had been surprise selection for the 1932 Lions tour to Australia and New Zealand, winning out over Jim Brough as the reserve full back to Jim Sullivan. He got his chance to play in the third and deciding test in the cauldron of Sydney’s SCG. The side won 18-13 to take the Ashes. His international career had begun on a high note and was to get even better. He played in twelve Ashes test matches, was captain in seven and, as Robert Gate points out in his wonderful essay in Gone North, was never dropped from the test side. He played stand-off, centre and full back and tasted defeat just once, in the last match of the 1937 Kangaroo tour after Britain had wrapped up the series by winning the first two tests. He also played in five test matches against New Zealand and won eighteen caps for Wales. 

The highlight of this amazing career was his captaincy of the 1946 Lions tour to Australia and New Zealand. In 1945 he had told the Australian league journalist W.F. Corbett that he was ‘too long in the tooth now’ to undertake another tour, but clearly the prospect of one last crack against the Australians was too much to miss. Much has been written about how the 1946 Lions had to make their way to Australia on an aircraft carrier, the HMS Indomitable and then had spend days on a train crossing the Nullaboor Plain. But what is often forgotten is the deprivations that the players had to endure before they even left for Australia. The RFL issued each player with a trunk to carry their belongings down under with them, yet Gus, and probably the rest of the side too, had trouble filling it. The war had ended yet rationing was still in operation. Clothing could only be bought if one had the right coupons, and that included sports equipment. 

‘I have found it difficult to obtain sufficient clothing for the trip,’ Gus told the Daily Despatch shortly before the tourists left. ‘I shall travel in my demob suit [the suit issued to each soldier when they left the army]. My football boots have been patched so often that their are now more patches than the original leather on the uppers.’ His wife described to the reporter how ‘it has been an awful job. I have patched and darned so that Gus could save his coupons for the tour but we have barely managed to scrape through.’ When the tourists finally arrived in Australia they found themselves showered with gifts, including food parcels to send home to their families. One of Gus’s regular duties as captain during the Lions’ visits to the country towns of New South Wales and Queensland was to receive a symbolic food parcel of local produce that would be sent to Britain as part of Australia’s support for what they still saw as the ‘Mother Country’ as it recovered from the war.

On the field, the 1946 tour was as fierce and competitive as anything that had gone before. On 17 June Gus led the side out on to the Sydney Cricket Ground just as he had done almost ten years previously. A twelve-man Britain held the Australians to an 8-8 draw, after Bradford’s Jack Kitching had been sent off for allegedly punching Australian captain Joe Jorgensen. In the key matches, Gus was regularly singled out for praise by the press. In the match against NSW in Sydney, Truth reported that he ‘showed what a fine player he is... Cool and calm, he collected the ball at will and found the open spaces with well- judged kicks. We had no counter.’

In the second test at Brisbane, which Britain won 14-5, W.F. Corbett singled him out for his ‘heady deeds’. For the third test, the teams returned to the SCG where the Australians found themselves overwhelmed 20-7. One of Australia’s major problems in the last two tests was the failure of their centres to make any progress against the British combination of Risman and Bradford’s Ernest Ward. It is worth remembering that Gus had celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday shortly before the side left for Australia. When he returned almost six months later, it was as captain of the only British side ever to go through an Ashes series undefeated. 

The curtain finally came down on this unprecedented career in 1954. Gus left Workington at the end of the 1953-54 season after a dispute with the club’s directors and played for a few months for Batley before finally retiring in December 1954. He was 43 years, 279 days old. He had played 873 first-class rugby league matches. He had kicked 1,678 goals and scored 232 tries. No-one even knows how many appearances or points he scored in war- time rugby union. 

Following his retirement, he looked certain to become one of the game’s great coaches. But it was not to be. Eddie Waring in his warm and generous tribute to Gus in The Great Ones described how he too thought that Risman would be ‘a natural as a manager, but he was unable to click as he done as a player-manager’. Perhaps it was his very longevity as a player that made it difficult for him to connect with players when he could no longer lead by example. His stints at Salford, Bradford and Oldham were sadly undistinguished.

At Oldham, where he had a short stint as manager in the late 1950s, it seems that players found him aloof. Whether this was a generational gap or the problem of the prodigiously gifted player trying to instruct those who were less talented is unclear. Sadly, as a manager he was never able to develop the rapport with players which he had when he played. Unlike his great rival Jim Sullivan he was never to become the great coach that everyone in the game expected him to be.Maybe having the equivalent of three great careers was enough for one mortal. 

In 1938 he had written How To Play Rugby League Football, the first book about the game ever to be produced by a national publisher. It was part of a series of instructional books that included England cricketer and Arsenal footballer Denis Compton on How To Play Association Football, Jack Hobbs on The Game of Cricket, James Hartley on How To Play Bowls Scientifically, and many others. In contrast to the huge numbers of books about soccer and rugby union, it took almost fifty years for a publisher to recognise the interest in rugby league. Even Harold Wagstaff’s autobiography was only published in weekly parts in a local newspaper. It was to be another two decades before another league book found a national publisher.

The fact that the next book was Gus's autobiography was testimony to his longevity and standing in the game. Rugby Renegade appeared in 1958 as part of the publisher Stanley Paul’s burgeoning line of sports books. It was ghost-written by the soccer commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme - later to find fame as the man who exclaimed ‘some people are on the pitch. They think it’s all over. It is now,’ when England won the world cup in 1966 - who as a school-boy in Bolton had seen Gus play in the 1930s. Although we do not have any sales figures, it must have been enough of a success for Stanley Paul to publish Lewis Jones’ King of Rugger later in the same year. 

Rugby Renegade is a fascinating book. Most sporting biographies, then as much as now, are usually straightforward narratives of the highs and lows of the athlete’s career. But Gus’s book is remarkably modest and tends to gloss over many of the highlights of his playing career. It’s difficult to get a sense of his towering reputation from reading the book. Perhaps this is due in part to Kenneth Wolstenholme’s lack of appreciation of Gus’s greatness and standing in the game. But it is also because the book, in true rugby league fashion, is also about the politics of rugby and most of its chapters are actually about controversies in the game, whether it is rugby union hypocrisy or why the cup final should be played at Wembley. This is one of the reasons why the book is so interesting. Gus is not bland and uncontroversial, as books of this nature often are, but determined to get his point over about what he feels is best for the game.

But there are also some wonderful moments of insight. Gus’s description of the moment in the second half of the 1951 Championship Final when he realised that Workington had beaten Warrington (‘it nearly made me swoon’) or his memories of returning to Cumberland with the cup in 1950 are striking insights. He also proves to be something of a prophet, predicting the emergence of a BBC2 Floodlit Trophy style competition and the move to two divisions. Twenty-first century readers reading the book for the first time may also experience a sense of deja vu.He debates whether the BBC are guilty of not giving the sport the publicity it deserves. And his assessment of the differences between league and union - ‘league is a faster game, a much more intense and open game’ - is one which has stood the test of time. 

Reading Rugby Renegade one gets a sense that Gus took to rugby league so quickly as a teenager because it suited his temperament. He felt like an outsider, having been born to immigrant parents and brought up in the multi-racial melting pot of Cardiff’s Tiger Bay. Interestingly, he attacks rugby union’s treatment of rugby league as the equivalent of the ‘colour bar’, as discrimination against non-white people was known in 1950s Britain. The book’s title is as much an affirmation of who he was as much as it was a description of his status. And like all those who are proud to be rugby league people, he turns the accusation that he is a renegade around to argue that it is not he who is in the wrong, but ‘those who have insisted that that there should be two organisations’ who are the real renegades, fostering intolerance and bitterness. 

How did Gus compare to other truly great players? In 1988 he was one of the inaugural nine players to be inducted into the Rugby League Hall of Fame. Like Harold Wagstaff, Jim Sullivan, Brian Bevan and Alex Murphy, he would have been an automatic choice. In terms of games played and points scored, his record, to use the cliche, really did speak for itself. But changes in the way the game is played make comparisons between different generations almost impossible. But in the 1930s there was really only one player who could be compared to Gus and that was Wigan’s Jim Sullivan. 

Gus and Jim were the binary stars of rugby league in their era, Although Sullivan was seven years older, they shared similar biographies, both being Welsh full-backs who became rugby league players at seventeen. Until Neil Fox eclipsed Sullivan’s points scoring record, it was Sullivan and Gus who stood at the head of the all-time points scorers records. And while Sullivan played for just under twenty-five years, Gus played for just over a quarter of a century although Sullivan played in more matches.

In the early 1930s it looked like Gus would have a limited international career because of Sullivan’s absolute domination of the full-back position. Whenever Wigan played Salford there was always a bite in the air, as Salford carved a reputation as the Cherry and Whites’ bogey team in the years before the war. It would have been easy for Gus to have been resentful yet it is clear from Rugby Renegade that both held each other in high regard. Their contrasting styles were sufficiently different that neither saw the other as a threat. Sullivan was Rome to Risman’s Greece. Sullivan was aggressive, driven and war-like.

After the 1932 Battle of Brisbane, in which Great Britain were finally beaten by a ten-man Australian team in the bloodiest test match of the interwar period, Sullivan left the field raging at the loss, angrily telling his side after the match that if the game had gone on for five minutes they could have won. His game was based not only on monumental skills but on physical intimidation. No-one who was tackled by Sullivan forgot it. Gus, in contrast, could be tough and uncompromising when necessary, especially in test matches, but played a game based on artistry and creativity. His was a game of the finely-crafted pass, the imperceptible change of pace and the anticipation of an opponent’s mistake. As well as a full-back, Gus was an all-time great centre and stand-off, but Sullivan commanded the full back position like no-one before or since. 

When he died at the age of eighty-three in 1994 it was just five days before Great Britain’s twelve-man 8-4 victory over Australia at Wembley. It was somehow appropriate that his death should be followed by an epic Ashes test, just like so many in which he had been involved. But words like epic, monumental and incredible were always a feature of Gus Risman’s career. It is the sheer scale of his achievements in rugby league that allow us to be so definite in our assessment of his genius. No-one will ever play the game for as long. It is very unlikely that anyone will ever score as many points as he did. And the nature of the game is such today that no-one will be able to build two or three separate careers in the way that Gus did. His achievement is singular and will remain so. 

Gus Risman was no renegade. He was an athlete, an artist, a visionary and a leader of men.