Our journey around the villages, towns and cities that have rugby league running through their veins heads to the North East.
IN THE likes of Brendan Foster, Steve Cram and Charlie Spedding, all of them Olympic medallists, the South bank of the River Tyne has spawned some seriously talented runners.
But athletics aside, significant sporting success has been relatively rare in the area, especially when it comes to rugby league – although it’s certainly not for the want of trying.
Newcastle Thunder’s recent move from Kingston Park to the Gateshead International Stadium marked the start of a fifth phase of a Tyneside team playing South of the water, stretching back to the game’s early days.
When the big breakaway of 1895 occurred, the North-East was a rich rugby area.
And six years later, South Shields, having lost plum fixtures against those Yorkshire clubs who had joined the Northern Union and also seen the growth of professional football clubs Newcastle United and Sunderland, decided to abandon the amateur oval-ball ranks.
Having played friendlies in their first professional season, the club who were based at the Horsley Hill ground, later used for football, joined the new Northern Rugby League Second Division in 1902-03.
But after their second second-tier campaign, and with financial problems growing, South Shields failed to gain re-election (the bottom three had to apply), with the expense of travelling to the North-East said to be a key factor in the thinking of the voting clubs.
The region remained in the thinking of the game’s governors, who in January 1934, gave the green light to an international between England and Australia taking place in Gateshead.
The Rugby Football League, who had played Kangaroos tour matches at Newcastle United’s St James’ Park in 1909, 1911 and 1929, were rewarded with an encouraging attendance of 15,576 at Redheugh Park, the home of the original Gateshead Football Club, who were at that time playing in the Football League.
Less than three years later, Newcastle had a rugby league club, who played their first season, 1936-37, at the city’s Brough Park ground before heading across the Tyne to take up residence at another greyhound stadium, White City in Blaydon, five miles West of Gateshead.
However just as with South Shields, Newcastle were short-lived, with their fellow clubs again landing the killer blow by voting against their re-election after a second-bottom finish in 1937-38.
Fast forward to the 1990s, and the RFL were again keen to crack on in the North-East – and had support from Gateshead Council, who were keen to increase usage of the International Stadium and promote both the watching and playing of sport.
The Charity Shield match, pairing the league champions with the Challenge Cup winners, had been created in 1985 as an official season opener, and was used to showcase the game in non-heartland locations.
After being played at Douglas on the Isle of Man, Liverpool and Swansea, Gateshead hosted the event in 1991 (Wigan 22 Hull 8 in front of 10,248) and 1992 (St Helens 17 Wigan 0 before 7,364).
The International Stadium, originally built in 1955 and redeveloped in the early 1980s, then staged a couple of England v France internationals and the group game between Australia and South Africa in the 1995 World Cup.
Super League arrived the following year – and with expansion part of the switch-to-Summer plan, a grassroots scene emerging in the area and the local council keen, the staging of two ‘On the Road’ games in 1998 accompanied the award of a franchise to a brand new club, Gateshead Thunder, for the 1999 season.
Australian chief executive Shane Richardson, a former top official at Eastern Suburbs and Cronulla Sharks, led the bid with Kath Hetherington, who had helped husband Gary (now, of course, chief executive of Leeds) to found Sheffield Eagles in 1984.
Another Australian Shaun McRae, having had three years at St Helens, took the coaching reins and recruited a squad packed with compatriots, including ex-South Sydney Rabbitohs halfback Willie Peters, who these days is Hull KR’s much-admired team chief.
With former Adelaide Rams winger Matt Daylight a prolific try-scorer and Luke Felsch, signed from St George Dragons, a driving force at loose-forward, McRae’s side were useful, finishing sixth out of 14 and just two points off the play-offs (at that time involving five teams).
But with a figure of 5,000 needed just to break even, the average attendance was 3,894, and an unsustainable £700,000 was lost over that first campaign.
A Super League financial incentive of £1.25m encouraged a merger with equally hard-up Hull (Huddersfield and Sheffield also amalgamated), and the entire operation was moved to Humberside.
A new Gateshead Thunder club were formed in time for the 2001 Northern Ford Premiership campaign (at that stage, there were only two divisions), but it’s fair to say financial issues have seldom been far away.
The move to Kingston Park (and name change to Newcastle) under the umbrella of the city’s Falcons rugby union club brought optimism.
And as the game emerged from the pandemic, Thunder beat four other League One clubs to claim Championship status via a bidding process, with their plan targeting eventual Super League rugby.
They even went full-time for the 2022 season, but things began to unravel, and a reversion to part-time status was followed by last year’s relegation and the threat of the club closing after the Falcons withdrew from involvement.
Chairman Keith Christie was central to the survival mission, and the club kicked off the current campaign based at Kingston Park before, in mid-May, announcing the return to Gateshead International Stadium, also used by the town’s current National League (fifth tier) football club, under a two-year licensing arrangement.
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 498 (July 2024)
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