Rugby League World – For a sport with a mind of its own…

For anyone who hasn’t stumbled across it yet, I have a rugby league archive of my writings for various league publications going back to the start of the summer era. It can be found here: RL Archive

In a nutshell, the site is just a random mish-mash, in no chronological order, of old interviews and the like. Personally, I find looking back over stuff like that to be eye-opening, entertaining and – more often than not – amusing. Being the chap what wrote it, the writing style often makes me cringe – there’s nothing like being slapped in the face with your own naivete – but what the heck. I was a wide-eyed optimist at the time and you can’t say fairer than that. I always try and drop a new (old) piece into the archive every day – or at least have done for the past three months – but that can’t go on forever. Chances are I will be slowing down to a crawl soon as suitable material runs low, but the archive shall remain for future online historians to pore over when rugby league has, in fact, taken over the world (cue maniacal laughter).

Also, some of the articles I uncover don’t really sit well among chats with players and coaches – usually smart-alec old columns and such – so I thought this RLW blog might be a good place to regurgitate them from here-on-in. Not on a regular basis or anything, just when it seems appropriate. So, bring in the trumpets, here is one such offering from Super League Week, the forerunner of Total Rugby League – itself the paper predecessor of LPL’s website by that name – first published in August 1998.

tubthumping column

A novel approach to League

AS the “let’s get back to winter” brigade never tire of telling us, it’s holiday time. Indeed, as you read this I shall be toes up on a beach in the future Rugby League hotspot of Perranporth, Cornwall. I don’t know about you, but to me holidays mean catching up on my reading. So this week I thought I’d take a look at how this great game of ours has been treated book-wise since Caxton first invented the photocopier.

Now, it has to be said, literary fiction and Rugby League are not the closest of bedfellows. Sure, there have been some great factual League books in recent years, Dave Hadfield’s XIII Winters,  John Haynes’ From All Blacks to All Golds and Paul Wilson’s The Best Years of our Lives to name but three. Historically, too, Mrs Beeton’s Victorian Cookery Book has undoubtedly been a huge influence on the catering facilities at many of our grounds. As for modern-day quality fiction, forget it (unless, of course, you are thinking of Framing the Future).

It wasn’t always thus. The traditional literary canon is packed to busting with Rugby League references, it’s just a case of knowing where to find them. So sit back, crack open another bottle of Nuis St Wilderspool, and take a trip with me on a whirlwind bibliographical odyssey that will raise eyebrows the length and breadth of the M62.

We start, predictably enough, in medieval times, with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a book which – despite the title – had nothing to do with a load of Aussie Bulldogs fans on a pilgrimage to the Belmore Sports Ground. No, the subject matter was much closer to home, as the following quote from “The Wife of Barrrrth’s Prologue” perhaps testifies.

“For trusteth wel, it is an impossible/ that any clerk wol speke good of wyves,/ But if it be of hooly seintes lyves,/ Ne of noon oother womman never the mo./ Who peyntede the leon, tell me who?”

Leaving aside how Chaucer’s poetic style was obviously influenced by the commentary of the late Eddie Waring, the “seintes” referred to here are clearly the ones currently playing at Knowsley Road. “Who peyntede the leon”, meanwhile, is an equally clear reference to the Aesop fable in which a St Helens supporter attempts to use his painting of Bobbie Goulding wrestling a Swinton Lion to the floor in a Welsh nightclub as evidence that Saints are a stronger outfit than Swinton. Unsurprisingly, the Lions fan to whom he is showing it doesn’t reckon much to said painting as evidence, reasoning that if he – or any other Swinton fan – had been the artist, the end result would have been different. What both Chaucer and Aesop are getting at here, I reckon, is that rugbye unione joonolystes are the ones who do the lion’s share of sports reporting and therefore it is no surprise that their sport is the one which gets the better press.

Anyway, from there we skip forward to the 18th century, and to the Enlightenment. The time in which floodlights were famously invented, thereby helping to make BBC2′s famous “Floodlit Trophy” of that era the huge success it turned out to be. The major Enlightenment literary figure, of course, was Wigan pair Andy and Paul Johnson’s great grandad, Dr Samuel, who famously declared that; “the only end of Rugby League is to enable its spectators better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.” Dr Johnson, of course, was a fan of Doncaster Dragons.

Actually the 18th century was something of a golden era for League literature. In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), for example, at one point the eponymous hero can be found wondering in his diary whether his new-found “savage” would prefer to be called Man Friday, Saturday, Sunday afternoon or early evening. Later in the book, too, there are a couple of paragraphs in which Crusoe ponders his island’s potential for attracting a Super League franchise. Almost fifty years later, Oliver Goldsmith – an author famous for the sentimental relish with which he writes about the moral authority of suffering – used his novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) to consider the plight of Primrose, a vicar who positively laps up the repeated trials and tragedies heaped upon him by a lifetime of supporting Wakefield Trinity. Goldsmith’s influence is still readily apparent today, as sports headline writers the country over continue to over-use the title of one his plays: “Broncos stoop to conquer.”

Of course, the novel really came into its own as an artistic form in the 19th century, when writers such as Haworth’s Bronte sisters (whose brother Bramwell was driven to drink after nearby Keighley Cougars were scandalously denied admission to the top flight in 1847), Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Peter Gill look-a-like George Eliott were to the fore.

Dickens wrote a whole raft of Rugby League novels; Great Expectations (a tale of RL administrators), Hard Times (another tale of RL administrators), Bleak House (a tale of BARLA HQ in set in Huddersfield) and Our Mutual Friend (a tale of Wendell Sailor), while Hardy, Eliott and Austen were no slouches either. Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) dealt with the sad demise of that town’s Marksmen, Eliott’s Middlemarch (1871) grappled with the best time to hold the Challenge Cup Final, and Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) concerned the experiences of a Sheffield Eagles player at the Don Valley Stadium.

With the 20th century came modernism, and authors such as Virginia (Warrington) Woolf, T.S. (Matthew) Eliott – whose epic poem The Waste Land was completely ruined with the advent of summer rugby at Odsal – and the great James Joyce, whose monumental 600 page work Ulysses (1922) is an ingenious account of the mind of a single man on a single day in Dublin. Joyce was originally going to base his book on Super League Week editor Tim Butcher’s last visit to the Emerald Isle, but he didn’t think there would be much of a market for a book with only half a page in it (Don’t bother coming back -ed). Incidentally, Ulysses‘s amazing richness of texture, combining mythical and literary allusions, parody and pastiche, punning and humour, with a powerful sense of the infinite complexity and subtlety of the individual’s emotional and intellectual life (it says here), was heavily influenced by this column.

Moving right along, as I can see the edge of the page approaching, there have been writers in the latter part of this century who have made an impact. Writers like George Orwell, whose Road to Wigan Pier (1937)  and Down and Out in London and Paris (1933) dealt so intelligently with salary caps and franchising respectively. Others include children’s writer Beatrix Potter, who had the good taste to name one of the cats in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers John Joiner after the ex-Cas coach of the same name, and Salman Rushdie who, since the infamous Fatwa, has taken to standing on the terraces at Leigh as no human being would ever be suspected of being there.

Most recently, the author of A Kind of Loving (1960), that archetypal sixties kitchen sink drama, took things to an interesting level when he merged with Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and became the Stan Barstow Border Raiders. Generally, though, it has to be admitted that today’s writers do not seem to be up to the challenge. Pass me another glass of Nuis St Wilderspool, Marjorie.

Hot on the heels of David Cameron, Boris Becker and, er, Jedward, come these latest celebrity endorsements all the way from the US of A. Who says the World Club Challenge is not an event of global significance?

Yesterday’s blog about ingrained attitudes towards particular sports on account of upbringing reminded me of the late, great Peter Cook. Now, as far as I am concerned, a funnier human being never walked this earth. So imagine my surprise, upon reading the equally late Harry Thompson’s magnificent biography of the man -- imaginatively entitled Peter Cook -- A Biography -- a couple of years back, to happen upon the following:

“Peter became an expert at minority sports, from world championship darts to truck-racing live from Idaho on satellite…His least favourite sport was Rugby League, but he watched even that assiduously enough to acquire an encyclopaedic knowledge. The fact that he actually sat down to watch it at all suggests that he was innately bored, in the way that people who sit through entire TV shows in order to write outraged letters of complaint about them are innately outraged.”

Remind you of anyone? I know that this rugby union skeptic shuffled a little uncomfortably the first time he read it. Meanwhile, here Cook is again, below, on the BBC’s Michael Parkinson show in 1976. The interview as a whole is a delight but the offending moment comes 3 minutes 50 seconds in. However supposedly anti-establishment you are, once a public schoolboy always a public schoolboy, even when you are as amusing as Peter Cook. Blinkers in place, that’s that. They ain’t coming off for anyone.

Does any of this matter? Has it affected my view of Peter Cook? Not really, no, on both counts. At heart, Cook and his Beyond The Fringe colleagues were always more about sending the British class system up than bringing it down. And his pompous authority figures like Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling (or was it Greeb-Streeling) were clearly semi-autobiographical. Makes you think, though, dunnit? Do we actually like and dislike things in the way that we say we do -- or are we just taking up learned positions that we trot out regardless? Oh and while we are coming over all philosophical, whatever did happen to Parky? Not seen him down at Cougar Park lately…

In the immortal words of millionaire Australian league tragic John Singleton: “Anyone who doesn’t watch rugby league is not a real person. He’s a cow’s hoof, an ethnic or comes from Melbourne.” Charming, eh? And for anyone blessed with an ounce of objectivity, quite obviously stark staring bonkers.

What is it about sport that brings out such an extreme form of bunker mentality? The phenomenon is at its most extreme down under where, fuelled by a partisan media, each of the football codes – whether that be league, union, aerial ping-pong (see, I’m at it now) or, well, football – seems permanently about to wipe the others off the face of the dingo’s head. The notion that folk might actually have the time and inclination to enjoy more than one code appears never to occur. History has a large part to play in that, of course, particularly where the two rugby codes are concerned. From my admittedly biased vantage point it is league that more often than not holds the moral high ground in that debate. But really, when you consider the huge political strides that have been made in recent years in places like Ireland, Germany and South Africa, isn’t it about time that those of us who like to watch grown men chasing a bag of wind around on our weekends all just grew up?

At which point, anyone following me on Twitter last Saturday afternoon (@tonehannan) would be perfectly entitled to say ‘practice what you preach, boofhead’. And they might just be right. But did you actually watch any of the opening games of this year’s rugby union Six Nations? Hyped to high heaven by their standard-bearers-in-chief, the BBC, yet possessed of all the entertainment value of a three-hour trip to buy haemorrhoid ointment on an epileptic camel; that would be about the gist of it. And could I resist telling all the smug, brainless sheep tossing off a steady stream of 140 characters in the Twitterverse so? Could I hell. I mean, surely, anyone with half a brain and one working eye could see that there is just no comparison between the two codes on just about every meaningful level other than profile, whether that be the application of basic skills, a thrilling game plan or edge-of-the-seat excitement. Except that they apparently could not. The terms Six Nations, rugby union and the rest were actually ‘trending’ – ie they were a hot topic of discussion up and down the land. Quality, it seems, does not necessarily equal popularity. And just as I wasn’t alone among fans of the 13-a-side code in getting stuck into the rampant dreariness on display, so were there plenty of less-than-appreciative comments about the so-called ‘northern game’ flooding in the opposite direction. In particular, these seemed to come from the likes of Ireland and Scotland where, we might assume, the charms of a professional play-the-ball have seldom been encountered first hand.

Any road, the following day – and after being robbed of the ability to trumpet league’s greater appeal thanks to that fog-bound farce at Knowsley Road – I turned my attentions instead to the prospects of that night’s Superbowl. Over the last two or three seasons, I have grown partial to a game of Sunday night American Football. Baltimore Ravens are my team, for no other reason than The Wire was based and filmed there. The Ravens hadn’t made it this year but, what the heck, it would be worth staying up for anyway. And then I read some of  the comments in the totalrl.com’s other sports forum and elsewhere. The majority of league fans, it seems, thought American Football a big fat waste of time. Overhyped, too much media coverage, stop and start, all the clichés about pads and helmets… you name it. Utterly ridiculous. And from time to time, you can find similar debates on there regarding football (or ‘Wendyball’ as that sport’s more vociferous critics would somewhat mysteriously have it) and cricket.

Ultimately, I suppose, it’s all about having an open mind, isn’t it? Recognising that there is more than enough room for everyone and every sport and following the advice of Thumper the rabbit’s mum that: “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” And also, while we are it, recognising how important growing up around a particular sport can actually be if we are to develop a deep, meaningful and lifelong passion for a social activity whose impact extends way beyond a mere 80 or 90 minutes on a stretch of grass or artificial turf. All the more reason to ensure that rugby league’s ongoing worldwide development work continues apace.

Just don’t expect me to take a blind bit of notice of any of the above once that bloody tedious Six Nations kick-and-clapathon kicks off again, that’s all.

I need to vent. Didn’t get to see a game live last night, or on TV, because her-to-whom-I-have-just-taken-a-pot-of-green-tea-upstairs (note to self: come up with better comedy nickname) and I went to the theeeat-or. Harrogate was the venue, the magnificent Count Arthur Strong – The Man behind the Slime (sic) the show. Most entertaining it was too. Had the pleasure of meeting the good Count afterwards – he is currently wading through my history of northern comedy (on sale at all good bookshops) – and a splendid fellow he proved to be. Most of his clan seem to be from the likes of Leeds, Dewsbury and Wakefield so there are probably league fans among them although, like the diligent blogger I am, I forgot to ask. “Martin! Put the music on!” Catch him on tour if you can.

Any road, although I wasn’t there in person, I was able to make excellent use of a marvelous new invention called the ‘Sky Plus’. In a nutshell, it allows you to ‘tape’ programmes that you would have watched had you stopped in but – here’s the best bit – WITHOUT ANY TAPE IN THE MACHINE. Remarkably, the Sky Plus is extremely easy to operate – the pressing of a single button does the job nicely – and is surely the best domestic invention since the kettle, sliced bread and vibrating rabbit combined. So well done Sky inventors. Big pat on the back there.

Tragically, however, when I settled down to watch Huddersfield versus Bradford this morning – having stayed clear of the scoreline (the Likely Lads would have had no bother if they had been rugby league fans) – it swiftly became apparent that taping the midnight highlights show had not been a good idea (couldn’t tape the real thing, as HTWIHJTAPOGTU wanted two episodes of something called Lost). Put briefly, who the hell edits these things and why – given that Sky Sports have no less than FOUR 24-hour channels to fill – does it have to be only highlights at all? Okay, you get to see the tries, the so-called pivotal moments and about five minutes of the kickers lining up their attempts whether the goal is destined to go over or not, but otherwise the shape of the game is wrecked completely. I was looking forward to studying the tactics of each team, assessing the individual impact of the likes of Matt Orford and David Fa’alogo, generally enjoying the ebb and flow… you know the drill. But thanks to the way in which the programme seemed to be have been cut with garden shears and then stuck back together with masking tape, all of that was impossible. Instead, it was just a procession of ‘events’ – a sort of Goals on Sunday for rugby but without Martin Tyler screaming the scorer’s name in that irritating mock-excited unconvincing way of his. And I say it again, why does it have to be highlights anyway? It’s not as though there isn’t bags of TV airtime to fill.

And then, just to add insult to injury, we get half an hour of something called Super League – Extra Time tagged on! Gah! I have nothing against this chatathon in the general run of things; normally available only through the red button more usually reserved for Commissioner Gordon, it is a nice way to bring the curtain down on any match – and last night’s little episode regarding Stevo’s diet and teeth, and Eddie’s fabled wig, was genuinely comical. No harm in any of that at all. But why does it take up so much time on the sodding replay showing? If I have taped a game it is because I want to watch THE GAME – surely that’s obvious? Why would I want to see several people in suits mulling over something that I haven’t fully seen instead? 

Somebody at Red Hall must read Rugby League World! Either that or I is a visionary or summat. Press release just landed from RFL (bravo):

Gillette World Club Challenge ad campaign to hit TV screens

Watch out Emmerdale and Coronation Street – the greatest Rugby League players in the world are coming! Viewers of two of Britain’s favourite soaps have a special treat in store next week when an exciting advertising campaign promoting the Gillette World Club Challenge between Leeds Rhinos and Melbourne Storm hits their screens on Yorkshire Television. The 30-second ad, ‘When Two Rugby League Worlds Collide,’ will appear in 12 slots throughout next week, including immediately after both Emmerdale and Coronation Street on Thursday (February 11) at 7.28pm and 8.59pm. Other times include the mid-show break of the ITN Evening News on Tuesday (6.45pm), during This Morning on Wednesday (10.30am) and the half-time break during Lion Country on Wednesday (19.45).

“This is the first time we have used TV advertising for the Gillette World Club Challenge and we’re confident the ad will generate massive awareness of one of the country’s top sporting fixtures,” said the RFL’s Marketing Manager Phil Williams. “The slots we have booked will take the ad into millions of homes at peak time viewing and that can only have a positive impact on ticket sales for the Gillette World Club Challenge. Tickets for the Gillette World Club Challenge between Leeds Rhinos and Melbourne Storm at Elland Road, Leeds, on Sunday February 28 (6.30) are now available with prices starting from just £20, or £10 concessions.

To purchase tickets from the RFL Ticket Office please visit www.rugbyleaguetickets.co.uk or call 0844 856 11 13.
Tickets are also available from the Leeds Rhinos Ticket Office at Headingley Carnegie Stadium or by calling 0871 423 13 15.

You have got to admire David Niu. Not only is he a man who somehow manages to have a surname that’s difficult to spell despite it consisting of only three letters, he has battled on for years to establish rugby league in the United States. There is an excellent feature in this month’s Rugby League World -- penned by Steve Mascord (who else?) -- in which he shares at least some of his latest plans to kick off a professional league circuit there, scheduled to be launched on 4 July this year and kicking off in 2011. It is easy to be cynical about such things but I prefer to wait and see. The potential riches -- in terms of what it can do for the 13-a-side code’s international profile, at least -- are immense and always have been. No room to go into the history of all that here but after ten-or-so years of patient grass roots building on the north east seaboard in particular, perhaps now really is the best chance ever finally to make that long-held dream a reality.

Although I’ve met Dave on a few occasions -- perhaps the most memorable being on a team bus with the Tomahawks as they yelled out Philadelphia Freedom while we roared through the streets of Moscow in 2002 -- I haven’t seen him for a while now, so it is good to know he is still plugging away. And as I am sure he would be the first to admit, things have grown to the extent that it isn’t just about him anymore. There are many other eager pioneers these days, including the estimable Daryl ‘Spinner’ Howland in Florida. I will be in New York in June and hope to catch my first-ever rugby league match on US soil, if this year’s expanded domestic league is underway by then.

Anyway, along with the RLW feature, this American musing was sparked by news that the RFL has secured television rights into the USA for our very own Super League this season, taking international viewing figures to “previously unreachable levels” according to the official press release.

A deal, it seems, has been struck with a company called America One, “a national television network reaching an audience in excess of 35 million households in 125 markets. America One’s nationwide coverage spans New York and Miami on the eastern seaboard through to Seattle and San Francisco on the west coast. The deal, brokered by media specialists IMG, provides live and recorded Engage Super League matches to America One, who also screened action from last year’s Gillette Four Nations.”

Looks like good news to me although -- this being rugby league -- it doubtless won’t be long before somebody, somewhere starts picking holes in it. For now, though, I think it’s worth celebrating that Super League matches are now broadcast in Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, France, the Middle East, eastern Europe, Italy, Spain and Russia too. An unimagineable footprint just a few years back. Now all we need is the NRL back on British TV screens.

And just to prove that it is not all hot air across the pond -- here are some video highlights of the Jacksonville Axemens’ 2007 domestic season off youtube for anyone who hasn’t seen them yet.

Hello, good morning and welcome to this here new blog, interweb fans, exclusively crafted and gilded at enormous expense for the all-singing, all-dancing brand new Rugby League World magazine what goes on sale today (Friday). It is a privilege to have grabbed your attention for a moment before you once again head off down the information superhighway, perhaps Google-ing for the latest rugby league gossip, a fool-proof recipe for chilli con carne (www.chilli-con-carne.co.uk since you ask) or an out of focus mobile phone video of a weeping bride chewing on her own snot (YouTube. Probably).

Honoured as I am to be appointed Rugby League World’s resident online blogger, I have no idea how this thing will develop, nor indeed what it will end up being about. You will just have to keep popping back for a look, follow the odd link from totalrl.com or press a button and subscribe to it or something. Or not. It’s up to you. You can ignore it completely if you like. Isn’t modern technology brilliant? If there is anything you agree or disagree with, feel free to pitch in with your own thoughts below. Try to keep it civil, though, or I’ll set that John Drake on you. Like the magazine itself, I am also there to be followed on Twitter (@tonehannan), where I regularly post 140 characters about absolutely nothing at all.

Mainly, of course, this blog is supposed be about rugby league – the clue is in the mag’s title, I suppose. But given that my life isn’t one hundred per cent devoted to the game – and I suspect yours isn’t either – there’s a fair chance a whole heap of other stuff will intrude from time to time too. You know – why British television weather forecasters insist on addressing us like six-year-olds; why there appears to be no such thing as a ‘professional southerner’; why no one has yet sued ‘comedian’ Marcus Brigstocke under the Trades Descriptions Act; and why the current Archbishop of Canterbury doesn’t trim his eyebrows; that sort of carry on. There might be the odd book review thrown in too, or piece of half-arsed social theorising. And why not? To paraphrase CLR James: “What does he know of rugby league, who only rugby league knows?”

My initial intention is to blog at least two or three times a week – more if time allows and/or the mood takes me. I will try not to ramble on for too long, as I’m sure both of us have far more important and profitable things to do with our day. I may even upload the occasional work-friendly photo or link to sites or blogs even more riveting and/or hilarious than this one. One of the many good things about the internet is that there is plenty of room for everyone, so I expect to live with my fellow rugby league bloggers in absolute peace and harmony. I am coming to the party late and, as the old saying goes, those who drink at the well must dig those who dug it, man, or something. So, in the spirit of entente cordiale and just to get things rolling, here is a photograph of Times rugby league blogger Christopher Irvine picking his nose at Odsal last season (no idea who the vagrant at the front is).