Our journey around the villages, towns and cities that have rugby league running through their veins heads to South Wales.
THERE have been plenty of attempts by rugby league clubs to muscle in on the rugby union stronghold which is South Wales, stretching right back to our game’s early days.
But only one, the team of that name who existed for one season in 1996, the first of the summer era, have taken a match to Swansea.
While South Wales started their sole campaign, in the Second Division, playing out of Aberavon’s Talbot Athletic Ground, and finished it at another even-better known union arena Cardiff Arms Park, Swansea hosted their match against Bramley.
The Leeds side were beaten 22-18 before 552 at the old Morfa Stadium, an athletics arena in use from 1980 until it was demolished to make way for what was then the Liberty Stadium, which opened in 2005.
Now known as the Swansea.com Stadium, it stages football, via Swansea City, and union, through Ospreys – who along with Cardiff, Dragons (from Newport) and Scarlets (Llanelli), are one of four fully professional Welsh sides, all of whom compete in the United Rugby Championship, which also includes teams from Ireland, Italy, Scotland and South Africa.
However Ospreys’ announcement that they are to leave the 21,000 ground for a smaller one at the end of the 2024-25 season has brought back into focus a venue which has its own place in rugby league history – St Helen’s on the Swansea seafront.
While the once town which became a city in 1969 to mark King Charles’ investiture as the then Prince of Wales might have had a minimal involvement with the club scene, it has played a bigger part in the international game.
That’s through both St Helen’s, which unusually has overlapping rugby and cricket pitches, and Swansea City’s former home Vetch Field, with both hosting World Cup ties among a string of internationals.
And thanks to the 30,000 who turned out to witness the European Championship clash with England in 1945, St Helen’s holds the record for the largest attendance for a stand-alone Wales rugby league match (it is also the largest for any event at the ground).
Ospreys were formed as a joint venture between former powerhouses Neath and Swansea, both of whom retained independent sides, albeit of a lower status, when Welsh rugby union chiefs launched a new structure in 2003.
The region used St Helen’s, where the Swansea club have played since 1873, a year after formation, until the opening of the Liberty Stadium 132 years later.
And now they will return to St Helen’s, in theory in time for the 2025-26 season, choosing the council-owned venue ahead of the Brewery Field at Bridgend, 23 miles away and itself no stranger to the 13-a-side code.
Ospreys will work with Swansea Council on a “multi-million pound” redevelopment which will increase capacity from the current 4,500 to 8,000.
While embracing the future, the project will bring a lump to the throat of traditionalists, given the history of the ground.
For alongside staging Wales internationals in both codes of rugby (including the Wales union team’s first home match against England in 1882) as well as football (against Ireland in 1894), St Helen’s was the scene of West Indies star Gary Sobers’ famous first six sixes in one over in first-class cricket, for Nottinghamshire against Glamorgan in 1968.
The redevelopment will spell the end of that sport at the venue, with Swansea Cricket Club set to be relocated as part of the plan, which Ospreys say “not only keeps us close to the majority of our supporter and sponsor bases, but allows us to work with the council to inject new life into a famous ground”.
After Wales played their first rugby league international against the New Zealand tourists at Aberdare in 1908, Swansea followed Tonypandy, Ebbw Vale, Pontypridd, Cardiff and Llanelli as the seventh location for a home game when those 30,000 saw England beaten 26-10 in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.
Wales’ next eight home matches were all at St Helen’s, and there were 13 there in total up to 1978, when the touring Australians won 8-3.
The 1975 World Cup was the first featuring Wales, a reflection of the glut of talent from the country in the British game at the time, and was staged over eight months, with the five entrants playing each other twice.
St Helen’s hosted Wales’ ties against Australia, who won 18-6, and New Zealand, beaten 25-24, with Les Pearce’s side finishing third in the mini-table (the coach played union for Swansea before turning professional with Halifax in 1949).
After a gap of 13 years, Wales returned to Swansea, this time using Vetch Field, when the defeated Papua New Guinea 68-0 in 1991.
Less than a mile away from St Helen’s, the venue which opened in 1912 and was finally demolished in 2011 had staged the Charity Shield clash between Widnes (24) and Wigan (8) which preceded the 1990-91 rugby league season.
The six Wales matches there up to 1999, when Ireland won 24-17, included the 22-10 victory over Western Samoa during the 1995 World Cup, when 15,385, the highest attendance for a rugby league game at the ground, turned out.
In 1998, Vetch Field (above) staged one of six Super League ‘On The Road’ matches, with Wigan beating St Helens 36-2.
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 499 (August 2024)
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