Our journey around the villages, towns, cities and regions that have rugby league running through their veins arrives in the West Midlands.
BINS have been in the news in Birmingham.
But amid a build-up of rubbish in the second city after a dispute between the council and refuse workers, a different type of strike has been talked about at the Alexander Stadium.
For the venue in Perry Barr in the north of Birmingham and well known for athletics is home to Midlands Hurricanes, who have started the League One campaign brightly under Mark Dunning.
The former Bradford Bulls coach is working alongside Eorl Crabtree, the ex-Huddersfield Giants prop who is now managing director of the club that rebranded from Coventry Bears ahead of the 2022 season.
Dunning and Crabtree are among those bidding to establish not just Birmingham, but the wider West Midlands, on the rugby league map – 116 years after the game was first played there.
The closest the first-ever tourists, the New Zealand All Golds of 1907-08, got to the region was a visit to the Athletic Ground in Cheltenham, 60 miles to the south, for a Test series-clinching 8-5 victory (Great Britain had won 14-6 at Headingley, Leeds and the visitors 18-6 at Stamford Bridge, London).
When Australia came a year later, the organisers chose football grounds in London (Park Royal, then home to Queens Park Rangers), Newcastle (United’s St James’ Park) and Birmingham (Aston Villa’s Villa Park) in a bid to expand the code.
And after a 22-22 draw in the opener in the capital and a 15-5 win in the second meeting in the north-east, the Lions took the honours by edging a 6-5 success in February 1909.
There were 9,000 at Villa Park, to where in 1897, Aston Villa had made the short move from Wellington Road, the site of which isn’t far from the Alexander Stadium.
Formed in 1874 and among the twelve founder members of the Football League in 1888 alongside West Midlands rivals West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers, Aston Villa were among the foremost clubs in the country, and while not quite on the scale it is today, in 1909, their home reflected that stature.
Originally a sports ground within a Victorian amusement park, when Great Britain saw off Australia through Oldham winger George Tyson’s late try, the pitch was surrounded by a cement track which staged both athletics and cycling, and with a main stand and three banks of terracing, the touchline section of which was covered, the arena had a capacity of 40,000.
There was a second visit to Villa Park by the Kangaroos when they made their second tour in 1911-12, and this time revenge was claimed.
After a 19-10 win at Newcastle and 11-11 draw at Edinburgh football club Hearts’ Tynecastle Park, Australia won 33-8 in Birmingham, although the attendance dipped to 4,000.
The first match of the tour had been against a combined Midlands/South side, beaten 20-11 before 3,000 at The Butts in Coventry, where a professional club had been established for the 1910-11 season, during which their ground staged England’s 39-13 win over Wales in front of 5,000.
Despite promising early crowds, rugby league’s first Midlands club lasted only three years, finishing 27th out of 28, 23rd out of 27 and finally in 1912-13, 26th out of 26, with the decreasing membership of the league showing the disappearance of a number of teams in that period, Coventry following Merthyr Tydfil and Ebbw Vale through the out door.
The original Butts was a multi-sports venue, with the complex also staging cricket (at one stage, it was used by Warwickshire), athletics and cycling.
Coventry Rugby Union Club had played there before the arrival of league, and after returning for a spell, built their own ground Coundon Road in 1921.
It was there that Coventry Bears played from their foundation in 1998 until 2004, when they moved with their 15-a-side counterparts to the new Butts Park Arena, built on the footprint of the old version and capable of holding 5,250.
The Bears entered the RL Conference in 2000, reached the Grand Final the year after and won the title in 2002.
After gaining entry to the new National League Three, the club won that competition in 2004, but then found the going tough and returned to the RL Conference to regroup and rebuild.
That process was achieved to the extent that the Bears turned professional and joined League One for the 2015 season.
In 2016, they played a one-off match at the 32,750-capacity Coventry Arena, which later that year staged a Four Nations double-header, watched by 21,009, in which England beat Scotland 38-12 and Australia defeated New Zealand 14-18 (it was also used in the 2022 World Cup, for the Kangaroos’ 84-0 victory over Scotland, when 10,276 were present).
The Bears attracted a best gate of 1,465 against Bradford in 2018, the Bulls’ sole season in the third tier, and having achieved a best finish of eighth in 2021, were taken over by Huddersfield businessman Mike Lomas, with the move to Birmingham and Midlands Hurricanes rebrand following.
Initially, the Hurricanes played at the Portway Stadium, the home of rugby union club Birmingham and Solihull to the south of the city centre, but since 2023, have been based at the Alexander Stadium complex.
Having existed as a major athletics venue since 1976, it underwent a £72 million redevelopment for the 2022 Commonwealth Games, when it held 30,000.
Further adjustments, which meant the Hurricanes had a spell playing at the adjacent warm-up arena, left the capacity at 18,000.
The team are aiming to build on the fifth-placed finish which meant they competed in last year’s play-offs.
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 508 (May 2025)
