Sporting Aspects
RUGBY FOR ALL
By J. P. W. MALLALIEU ti; HE split ! " I had gone to a football match, but I thought: " Oh, goodness ! They are talking politics." But my neighbours were talking about the split at the end of the nineteenth century which carved the Northern from the Rugby Union.
Twenty years before I was born, so I am told, only one winter game mattered in the North of England, a game played with seemingly unscientific fervour and an oblong ball. But in the 'eighties the game ran into trouble, which generated the wrong sort of fervour. While some people continued to believe that Rugby football should be played for itself alone, others began to believe that it could still be played as a game, with fun and fervour, if broken time and travelling expenses were met by two golden sovereigns placed discreetly in a football- boot before the players changed. Though in cricket and soccer amateurs and professionals live and play happily in the same game under the same ruling body, the bitterness over professionalism in rugger went so deep that, in the 'nineties. northern clubs not only broke away from the Rugby Union, and formed their own controlling body .in what is now the Rugby League, but so amended the playufg rules that Rugby League became a distinctly different game. Before this sad split. Rugby in the North had been what it still is in Cumberland and Northumberland, in South Wales and in Devon and Cornwall—a game played by everyone, regardless of class or social standing. It had deep roots in the community. The expensively educated sons of mill-owners played in the same team with the board-school-educated sons of weavers, and there was no bar between them. But after the split working-class players and supporters tended to turn to the League while the middle class stayed with the Union.
The gap was made wider still by the attitude of the Rugby Union. Any man who played so much as one game of Rugby League, even as an amateur, was automatically barred for life from Rugby Union. Rugby League was made so much of a pariah that even after this last war a touring New Zealand side was refused permission to train on a Rugby Union ground near their headquarters. One can understand something of the attitude of the Union. It was distressing for clubs to find some of their most skilled or promising players being wheedled away from them to the League by offers of cash down and a regular wage. But this stand-offishness recoiled. Because they did not want even to appear to be following Rugby League, the rulers of Rugby Union were hesitant to accept changes in playing rules which could have made the game more attractive. More- over the atmosphere of " class " which crept in, as well as the jealous bitterness of both sides, disgusted many possible sup- porters, who turned with relief to the Iess troubled world of soccer. While rugger was trying to cut its own throat soccer became our winter national game.
Today, however, there are some signs that a coming together of rugger's two branches may not be altogether impossible. During both wars players from League and Union played in the same teams and, even after the war, teams from the Union have played teams from the League under Union rules. Prosperous League clubs have helped, and are helping, struggling neigh- bours from the Union by lending grounds with large accommo- dation for important matches, and •the Union itself has abandoned some of the rules which forced it into discourtesies towards touring League sides.
Nor do people really feel today, as they used to feel, that there is some sort of stigma attaching to a Rugby League player. that he belongs to a lower social sphere than his Rugby Union colleague. In the Huddersfield team I watched last Saturday there were a school-teacher, the manager of a car-sales firm.
an ex-public-school boy whose course in dentistry at Leeds University is being paid for by the club, a gas-inspector, two coal-miners, an electrician, a welder, a brick-layer, a joiner, a labourer, a mechanic and a wholesale salesman. They happen to be paid forpIaying, and no doubt the money comes in handy; but they are not dependent on it. Every player has to have a full-time job before he can play for the club. In fact Rugby League teams today are what Rugby Union teams used to be- e cross section, not of one class, but of the community.
So, too, are the crowds which watch them. Oh, those crowds!
Rich and poor, old and young, master and man welded together in a spectatordom which is as lively as the game they watch. They know the rules. Indeed, a Rugby League crowd is the best informed sporting crowd I know. It is also the least intik bited about expressing its views, so that any referee who comes unscathed through the burning, fiery furnace of a game has done well. A Rugby League crowd also knows the play and appreciates good play whatever side plays it. On Saturday a gale tore straight down the field with incessant ferocity all after- noon long. But, despite this, both Huddersfield and Batley managed to give and take passes cleanly and at speed, and the crowd forgot its smarting cheeks and numbed fingers to roar appreciation at both sides.
True, it might have roared somewhat less if Batley. and not Huddersfield, had been leading by a big score. But the fact remains that I several times heard Huddersfield supporters shout : " Well played, Batley " and mean it. A Rugby League crowd wants its own team to win, but even more it wants to see good football. So it will readily criticise bad play from its own side—and no one tries to censure it for so doing.- As I looked at Saturday's crowd, I could not help comparing them with a Rugby Union crowd on a similar day and at a similar match. At the Old Deer Park, at the Rectory Field, even at Twickenham there would be a sprinkling of young men, uttering muffled adjurations through their great-coats. But here, even with this biting wind, for a match which had no especial attraction, were some 9,000 men, women and children, red in the face with the intensity of their exertions, telling the referee to " get some refereeing done " when one of his decisions displeased -them, urging him to "give the players a hammer apiece " when some bit of rough play escaped his notice, rising from their seats or swaying along the terraces so as not to miss one movement of a flying winger as he went for the line, waving, gesticulating, pointing to make sure that their neighbour has not missed some particularly tricky move by the outside half, grumbling, commenting, praising, blaming, throwing themselves as vigorously as any player into /he game.
I wish, I wish that I could see crowds like that at Herne Hill, at Richmond. I see them still in South Wales and at Twickenham or Murrayfield when there's an international. But I see tnem no more at ordinary chib-games in England. The roots of Rugby in England are no longer thrust deep enough into England's soil, and the game itself, though still fine to play, is no longer, often, fine enough to watch. Could not the Rugby Union bring itself nearer to the League by adopting the rule which forbids a player to kick full pitch into touch, except from a penalty, or the play-the-ball rule which speeds the game by substituting a two-man scrum for the loose or full set scrum after a player has been tackled ? Could not the League come nearer to the Union by restoring the line outs from touch instead of the set scrums it now decrees ? Could not both Leagu6 and Union agree that, as in cricket so in Rugby, amateurs and pro- fessionals shall play side by side ?
I believe that, if these things were done, Rugby would come once more into its own. It is not enough to say that a game is for players only. The spectators matter too. And, if the game were brightened bra some changes of rifle and reinvif,,or- ated by the infusion of new skill, which would be possible if only one code were drawing on the country's Rugby-playing resources, I believe that, spectators once again would come. not just from once class but from a community, to fire themse.ves and the players with their enthusiasm.
Previous page
