Page 66 - Rugby League World (February 2020)

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FINAL WHIS TLE w i t h M a r ty n S a d l er
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FINAL WHISTLE with Martyn Sadler
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A S WE STAND on the verge of the 25th
season since the creation of Super League,
I think it’s fairly safe to say that this season
is the most important Rugby League season
we’ve ever anticipated.
Mind you, I tend to say that every year.
And, in the sense that the future is more important
than the past, it is normally true.
Just as a club’s next match is more important
than the last one, the new season is more important
than the one we’ve just had, although St Helens
supporters can feel free to disagree with me.
But this season is particularly important for the
Wolfpack and for all those Rugby League fans who
desperately want Rugby League’s international
expansion to succeed.
We will see Toronto make their debut in Super
League in the double header at Headingley, when
Sonny Bill Williams will also make his Super League
debut at the age of 34.
especially given they have only made two other signings What are we
This season, for the first time, two of the twelve
Super League clubs will be from outside the UK.
It’s hard to know how Toronto’s season will unfold,
in addition to Sonny Bill, in Brad Singleton from Leeds
and James Cunningham from London Broncos.
Despite the fanfare surrounding the capture of celebrating?
Sonny Bill, their recruitment hardly looks strong
enough to enable them to compete with the best in
Super League and they have probably the smallest
squad in the competition. But it’s hard to imagine August 1895, while claiming that we will be celebrating
that they won’t be in the market for top players as the 125th anniversary of the game on 29 August 2020,
the season unfolds, particularly if they don’t start the when we should in fact be celebrating the 125th birthday
season well. I can’t imagine that their owner David of the RFL itself.
Argyle will hesitate to dip into his pocket if the need You might think that I’m being pedantic by making
arises in order to avoid an immediate relegation. this point. After all, who cares about what happened so
And of course that could be a problem for the other long ago?
Super League clubs. But we should care, because Rugby League has just as
If Toronto aren’t going to be relegated, then which much right to claim the history of rugby prior to 1895 as
club will be? rugby union does. At that time there was just one code
In another eight months we’ll know the answer to of rugby, which would split into two in 1895.
that one. The Yorkshire Cup, for example, was first played
Super League may be in its twenty-fifth year, but for in 1878. There were 18 Yorkshire Cup Finals played
the Rugby Football League will celebrate 125 years of before the great split in 1895.
existence on 29 August this year. During that period the current Halifax RLFC won the
As we all know, the Northern Union, which Cup five times, Wakefield Trinity won it four times,
changed its name to become the RFL in 1922, can while Dewsbury, Batley, Huddersfield and Hunslet each
chart its formation very precisely to that meeting on won it once.
29 August 1895 at the George Hotel in Huddersfield. The other winners were Bradford Park Avenue, who
But most of the clubs that attended that meeting would later switch codes to association football, Thornes,
had already been in existence for 20 years or more. a local club in Wakefield that would later go defunct,
Some of the great players of that era, such as Albert Otley and Pontefract, who still exist as rugby union clubs,
Goldthorpe or Dickie Lockwood, began playing and Brighouse Rangers in 1895. Brighouse would join
rugby before the Northern Union was created, and the Northern Union, but didn’t last long, although the
they carried on playing for those clubs that had current Brighouse Rangers club that plays in the Pennine
joined the Northern Union after August 1895. League keeps the Rugby League flag flying in the town.
The game they played didn’t change, as least for My old colleague Raymond Fletcher, when he edited
the first couple of years. the Rothmans’ Yearbook, used to list the clubs’ year of
There was continuity in the sense that most of formation as 1895, which I always complained to him
the clubs carried on playing against the teams they about, but could never persuade him to change.
had always played against until that point. The only We even had the crazy situation in which some current
difference was that they answered to the Northern rugby union clubs from Yorkshire towns laid claim to the
Union rather than the Rugby Football Union and they pre-1895 achievements of those Rugby League clubs.
played in a formal league system. No doubt it’s too late now, but I would make a plea to
So I’m disappointed to see the RFL stating, quite the RFL to recognise that Rugby League didn’t begin in
erroneously, that Rugby League was created on 29 1895, but was in existence long before that. RLW

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