How the long Good Friday will fade to grey

ANOTHER little bit of important sporting history was consigned to the scrapbooks and the video archive this Easter weekend.

It may not set the pulses racing in Clare, Cork and Kilkenny but we have witnessed the last-ever Good Friday derby between St Helens and Wigan at Knowsley Road.

To understand the significance of this it’s marginally necessary to know something about rugby league and to possess a superficial knowledge of the North of England.

Only three aspects of sport across the Irish Sea have ever resembled GAA in terms of their local roots and loyalty to sense of place. One of those is village cricket – a topic that need not delay us on this occasion. Another was South Wales rugby in the days when the Principality had steelworks, mines, and chapels and before the forced reorganisation of affinities which accompanied the opening up of the game.

And the third of those is professional rugby league.

The story of rugby league is the history of modern sport. Until 1895 rugby was unified under the auspices of the Rugby Football Union and the Football Association.

The RFU were determined to enforce the “amateur” principle and outlawed broken time payments to players who had to take time off work to play rugby, a direct challenge to the (more successful) Northern teams who included a high percentage of coal miners, steel workers, and mill workers in their ranks.

Then they banned rugby at grounds where spectators were charged an entrance fee. Twenty-two clubs called an emergency meeting at the George Hotel next to Huddersfield Railway Station and seceded from the RFU to create the Northern Rugby Football Union.

Two years later they scrapped the line-out. The year after that they embraced full professionalism and in 1906 abolished the scrum and reduced teams to 13 players.

The aim of the founding fathers was to produce a fast, mobile, game and for generations they fielded big forwards who had the pace and side-step of three-quarters and whose handling skills were a revelation compared to the amateur code... the prototypes of current day Six Nations, Heineken Cup and Super 14 players.

Rugby Union players, incidentally, are known in the North of England as “Rah Rahs”, an insult you will understand if you have ever been among the spectators at Harlequins or Rosslyn Park.

Rugby League’s creators set the standards for the birth of sustainable spectator sport (it was the first professional game to play on Sundays) and as such everyone has a debt of gratitude to those early pioneers who included among their number St Helens, and Wigan.

Another of rugby league’s innovations was to fully embrace the new medium of TV, and in the 50s and 60s, before the classified check, an afternoon’s viewing would often consist of motocross (I was always a bit of a Torsten Hallman fan on his 250cc Husqvarna) before the main event of the day, the rugby league with Eddie Waring.

Waring, before he was parodied by the mimic Mike Yarwood and realised that there was more money to be had by living up to the cliché, was the voice of rugby league for more than two decades with a turn of phrase to match that other great wordsmith, his Union counterpart Bill McLaren.

Everyone knew Waring’s pet sayings “it’s an oop’n’under” and “he’s going for an early bath” (usually accompanied by a fey giggle) but it was his commentary on May 11, 1968 that resonates. On that day two Yorkshire clubs, Wakefield Trinity and Leeds, were contesting the Challenge Cup on a rain-ruined Wembley pitch in a game that became known as “the water-chute final.” In the final seconds the lethal goalkicker Don Fox, had a potentially match-winning conversion from five yards which he would normally put over with his eyes closed. He sliced it wide.

“Oh, he’s a poor lad” was Waring’s immediate verdict. The nation agreed.

Rugby League also gave us what is arguably the greatest film about team play (or in this case lack of it). This Sporting Life told the story of a brutal ex-miner, Frank Machin, who was recruited as a loose forward. It was remarkable not only for the screen debut of Richard Harris in the lead role but also for the fact that the director Lindsay Anderson developed an unrequited affection for the Limerick man during its filming.

The Knowsley Road Good Friday match between the Lancashire rivals has been played every year since 1956 and this weekend was part of an extravaganza of 32 matches which commenced at 6pm on the Cumbrian coast when Whitehaven faced Barrow, and ended, by way of Australia, in Perpignan on Monday evening when the Catalans Dragons played Leeds.

Other sports have long since abandoned such a rigorous schedule. The time was when English football played on Good Friday, again the next day, and on Easter Monday.

Bill Shankly’s Liverpool began their run-in to their first modern title in 1964 when a Roger Hunt hat-trick demolished Tottenham prompting Shanks to say “titles are won at Easter.”

St Helens lost their last derby match against Wigan and are moving to a new ground on a disused glass works. Like those who once went to Highbury, or Cardiff Arms Park, or the Baseball Ground supporters may find that there’s a hidden cost and a thing that’s lost for what we call progress. The ghosts don’t move with you.

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