Back in the early nineties, Dave Hadfield was one of the contributors to the British Coal-sponsored Rugby League Yearbook, edited by Tony Pocock, who, while a director of Faber and Faber, had previously published the annual Rugby League Review.
As a director of the distinguished publishing house, which listed the likes of TS Eliot, Philip Larkin and William Golding among its authors, Pocock could be expected to recognise a good writer when he saw one. Public school and Oxford-educated, he was, he confided, a little bemused by Hadfield, this large, bearded, outwardly gruff character with a broad Lancashire accent. “But,” he said, “he writes like an angel.”
Hadfield, who has died aged 70 after suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, wrote with enviable fluency, usually with a light touch and wry sense of humour that endeared him to his many readers, whether in The Independent and the i newspaper which followed, in Open Rugby and its successor Rugby League World, in Forty20, in Australia’s Rugby League Week under the pseudonym George Dunkerley, as well as in his several books.
He filed copy to very early editions of League Express from far-flung corners of the Rugby League-playing world. He also worked for Sky TV, who tapped into his natural ability to connect with people.
A native of Bolton, he first became seriously involved in Rugby League while covering the matches of the now-defunct Blackpool Borough for the local newspaper, even turning out for the A team as a bustling front row forward. He credited Blackpool’s coach, Albert Fearnley, for persuading him that he could make a living out of writing about the game. He continued to play for his local Bolton club into ripe middle age.
Hadfield cut an imposing figure. Gregarious and popular, without going out of his way to be so, he had a large appetite for the game and life in general. His opinion counted and he never shied away from facing up to some of Rugby League’s bigger egos. For that too, he was much respected.
At the launch of one of his books at Billy Boston’s pub in Wigan, Neil Tunnicliffe, then an editor at his publisher, Kingswood Press, before becoming RFL chief executive, called Hadfield our best Rugby League writer – a claim Hadfield promptly rejected on the grounds that it could be libellous.
He had been sadly absent from the press box for the past three or four years. But in what must have been one of his last articles, he showed he hadn’t lost his touch.
In a feature about Blackpool for the Summer Bash match programme at Bloomfield Road in 2019, he told about how future Great Britain forward Hugh Waddell found his way into Rugby League. Waddell, he recounted, came from Burton-on-Trent, where he ran a flower stall on the market. He went for trials with Borough, made a good enough impression to be signed, and, wrote Hadfield, “the rest is floristry”.
For lines such as those and much else he’ll be missed.
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