Our journey around the villages, towns and cities that have rugby league running through their veins heads to Wigan.
TWENTY three league titles so far, six more than the next on the champions list, old rivals St Helens.
Five World Club Challenges, matching Australian aces Sydney Roosters.
Twenty one Challenge Cups, including the first at Wembley in 1928-29 (Leeds are second on the winners’ board with 14).
Eighteen Lancashire League triumphs, well above nearest challengers Saints with eight.
Twenty one Lancashire Cups, taking in both the first (1905-06) and last (1992-93), with Saints closest to that tally on 11.
Oh, and eight John Player/Regal Trophies (Warrington are next best with four), six Premiership trophies (the same as Widnes), four Charity Shields (Widnes claimed three) and a BBC2 Floodlit Trophy.
Let’s shine a light on the wonder of Wigan, rugby league’s most decorated club.
By beating Warrington to lift this year’s Challenge Cup, they were in possession of all four pieces of silverware available to them (the 2023 League Leaders’ Shield and Super League title and World Club Challenge, claimed in February at the expense of Penrith Panthers, were already in the cabinet).
Wigan’s overall trophy haul is testament not only to the simple desire to be the best over a long number of years, but also the way various boards have managed matters, sometimes a little controversially, and the club’s resilience, with setbacks, such as relegation from the top flight in 1979-80, sometimes occurring, but so far being reacted to and recovered from.
Yet the sporting picture in the town which historically thrived through a mixture of coal, textiles, engineering and a myriad of small industries but then suffered during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when George Orwell highlighted the issues facing so many places in ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, could have been very different.
For Wigan is between Manchester and Liverpool, those two bastions of football.
And in neighbouring Bolton, Blackburn and Preston, the round-ball game was also growing rapidly when, in 1879, came the establishment of the town’s current rugby club, then known as Wigan Wasps and wearing blue and white hoops (the change of name to plain Wigan came in 1881 and to cherry and white five years after that).
Wigan, sharing the Prescott Street facilities of the town’s main cricket club, were among the 22 founder members of the Northern Union in 1895, but found the early years of professionalism challenging.
Around this time, there was a move to establish football alongside athletics, horse trotting and cycling at newly-developed Springfield Park in the north of the town.
Wigan County were launched amid hopes that football would become the foremost sport, but that project fell flat, as did future attempts via Wigan United, Wigan Town and Wigan Borough, who made it all the way to the Football League but went out of business during the 1931-32 season, with the current Wigan Athletic formed in the aftermath.
Back at the turn of the 20th Century, the rugby league club were enjoying something of a resurgence, and as they sought a new home at which to develop, played at Springfield Park, alongside Wigan United, in 1901-02, when they won their first Lancashire League title as they prepared to move to their own Central Park.
That ground was actually so-called because it was built on land alongside the River Douglas previously belonging to the Great Central Railway, but as the title suggests, was more easily accessible.
And becoming established there marked a turning point for Wigan, who helped by their success on the pitch, continued to keep football at arm’s length.
Central Park became one of rugby league’s best-known and most iconic venues, staging a string of internationals and finals and surviving until 1999, when the club set up home with Wigan Athletic at a new shared venue, originally titled the JJB, then DW and now Brick Community Stadium.
The Latics had played at Springfield Park for their entire existence, becoming a well-established non-league club before eventually and after years of trying, winning election to the Football League at the expense of Southport in 1978.
After moving to the current stadium, they went on to play in the Premier League between 2005-06 and 2012-13, when they also won the FA Cup by beating Manchester City at Wembley.
Springfield Park, incidentally, had a further season of staging rugby league in 1987-88 through Springfield (formerly Blackpool) Borough, who soon moved on to Chorley.
There had also been a second senior rugby league club, Wigan Highfield, between 1922-23 and 1932-33, when amid financial difficulties, they relocated to London, then Liverpool.
While in Wigan, Highfield played at a modest ground on Tunstall Lane, sometimes referred to as Billinge Road.
But Wigan have always been the hottest oval-ball ticket in town, their stars, including Jim Leytham, Jim Sullivan, Billy Boston, Ellery Hanley, Andy Farrell and Sean O’Loughlin, and honours far too numerous to list comprehensively in this type of article, with their most consistently dominant period coming in the late 1980s and first half of the 1990s.
Then they were league champions seven times in succession, won the Challenge Cup eight times in a row, and memorably won the World Cup Challenge by getting the better of Brisbane Broncos in Australia, although all that success came at a cost, with the club’s debts leading to the sale of Central Park and union with Wigan Athletic.
The relationship hasn’t always been the most harmonious, but these days both clubs are under the ownership of data publishing billionaire Mike Danson.
Wigan Warriors (the latter part of the title was added in 1997) are seeking a new era of sustained success under coach Matt Peet and working to further develop their women’s team, led by former men’s star Denis Betts, with plans to establish an academy.
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 501 (October 2024)
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