MICHAEL O’HARE celebrates the history of Ashes Test series between Great Britain and Australia and urges the RFL to think again about replacing Great Britain with England.
It’s confirmed (well, almost)!
Next year will see the first men’s Rugby League Ashes series on home soil for 22 years (the first Ashes series for 22 years, full stop!). Venues as diverse as London, Newcastle and Manchester are being bandied about.
Full houses guaranteed? Let’s hope so.
But the last time Australia visited these shores they took on a different team to the one they’ll play this time around. In 2025 England will take on Australia; 22 years ago the home nation played as Great Britain. The logic somewhere seems to be that England versus Australia is a bigger sporting rivalry than Great Britain versus Australia.
I interviewed Troy Grant, chair of International Rugby League, for Rugby League World in December. This is what he said: “The last Great Britain tour south was frankly a disaster financially and on the pitch. England versus Australia is a greater rivalry than Great Britain versus Australia in the modern day. The wonderful Great Britain-Kangaroos tests of the 1970s to 1990s are unforgettable, but in 2024 England versus Australia has greater commercial appeal.”
However, this will be the first time ever that England has met Australia in an Ashes series. In the early 20th century some Ashes touring teams were called England (often incorrectly used as a synonym for Britain in the days of Empire) but they contained players from all over the British Isles – especially Wales – in much the same way as the ‘England’ cricket team still does today.
Other early touring teams were known as the Northern Union and they too were pan-British.
So from that perspective, I have to disagree with Troy. Yes, the 2019 tour crashed, but had it been England not Great Britain, the outcome would have been exactly the same.
Great Britain looms large in the iconography of Rugby League in these islands, it’s our international brand, something no other sport has. Sure, rugby union has the Lions but they only compete against specific nations and never play on home soil. Our Lions do. It’s our team and, using modern parlance, it is a brand that has resonance and recognition. And, of equal importance, it is steeped in history.
The Ashes is a series that has stood the test of time. Even when mothballed by a reluctant Australia these past two decades, there have been constant calls from this side of the planet to revive it.
Legendary is an overused word in sport, but the Rugby League Ashes deserves that epithet. It has endured since 1908 and has left an indelible mark on the sport in this country: the Rorke’s Drift test of 1914, the Battle of Brisbane in 1958, the last Ashes victory by a British team in 1970, and the famous, against-the-odds win in Sydney in 1988.
“The Great Britain team is distinctive, deep-rooted and cultural,” says Tony Collins, Rugby League historian and emeritus professor at the Institute of Sports Humanities at Loughborough University.
Great Britain is also inclusive. Football and union have their England teams, but we are Rugby League, different in so many ways.
Not for us the narrow nationalism of soccer. If it’s going to be England from now on, we’ll never discover another Billy Boston, Dave Valentine or Brian Carney. No Clive Sullivan. No Jonathan Davies. No Gus Risman.
The other nations of the United Kingdom might not produce players as they once did, but they never will if we deny them the opportunity to perform in Rugby League’s most prestigious, most historic international series.
To see those 13 men in white jerseys with the distinctive red and blue V going toe-to-toe with the green and gold, is something once witnessed, never forgotten. Let’s demand a rethink.
Let’s give London a try
It’s an oft overlooked fact that London has more amateur Rugby League teams than Wigan, Hull or Leeds.
Okay, so statistics, to paraphrase American academic Aaron Levenstein, are rather like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but they still conceal bits.
London is a far bigger city than Wigan, so maybe you’d expect more clubs. But I’d wager a few readers are still surprised. The consensus is that there is little to no interest in the sport in the UK’s capital city. We’ve tried London and it’s been a failure, is a widely held opinion.
But in reality we haven’t ‘tried’ at all. Clubs have been set up in London (and elsewhere) and left to their own devices. Leaving the fate of the sport in the capital to one wealthy individual and simply hoping they ‘get it right’ is no strategy at all.
David Hughes has latterly carried this particular can and, like the even-more-wealthy Richard Branson before him, he did the heavy lifting alone. The misnomer that London receives special funding from the RFL is widespread, but – perhaps unfortunately – untrue.
‘Trying’ requires the kind of targeted decade-long strategy employed by New Zealand Warriors before their entry into the NRL and more latterly the forthcoming franchise in Perth. Their backers, and the governing body, realise it takes a long time to launch a club into the public consciousness. You can’t plonk it down and hope it thrives hand-to-mouth.
Instead there should be years of groundwork, figuring out the best locality for the club, engaging the local population, especially schools and youth organisations. Fund it through those first difficult years and ensure it is well resourced. And market it, for months or years beforehand if necessary.
Rugby League has first-hand experience of what targeted marketing can do in the capital. When the RFL ran their “Will the Aussies catch Offiah at Wembley?’ campaign with 1,000 advertising sites on the London Underground before the 1992 World Cup Final they were rewarded with a then record attendance for an international match of 73,631.
Before that, in 1990, 54,569 turned up at Wembley – an Ashes Test match record for the UK. For both games a third of ticket sales came from London and the south-east. It cost money, but it was in the days before social media, which has a wider reach for far less outlay.
And although the World Club Championship of 1997 was deemed a miserable failure, London Broncos bucked the trend and saw sell-out crowds – higher than most northern clubs – with temporary stands having to be built at The Stoop.
And even recently, when the England-Samoa World Cup semi-final was played at Arsenal, nearly half the ticket sales came from the south-east.
Yes, it will cost money. And yes, it might be money we don’t have, but if that is the case let’s be honest about it instead of saying we ‘tried’ and people just aren’t interested. Because in a city of 12 million that’s just nonsense.
It also shows a marked lack of ambition; let’s put it in the too-hard box and forget about it. Even if you only focused on ex-pat northerners and Antipodeans living in London (which would be a mistake) that’s still a sizeable constituency. It’s also selling the greatest team sport on the planet very short.
It’s fair enough to say we simply don’t have the money and the resources to do what the NRL did in Auckland and is doing now in Perth.
What isn’t fair – on Rugby League in the capital and our sport in general – is that we have ‘tried’ London and ‘failed’. The truth is we’ve barely tried at all.
The value of the World Club Challenge
Once again the World Club Challenge has been given short shrift, this time by NRL Premiers Penrith Panthers.
The WCC could, and should, be huge – frankly I’d make it the centrepiece of the Las Vegas weekend. This is, after all, the most important club game of the year, but you’d never know that considering the lacklustre support it receives from down-under.
Imagine Manchester City saying “Oh we can’t be bothered with the Champions League this year.” It’s a ludicrous notion.
It’s abundantly clear that our Australian counterparts fail to understand the value of the WCC to British Rugby League. Last season’s Wigan-Penrith match – an absolute cracker – was shown on free-to-air national television. The morning after the BBC broadcast, people in my London workplace were talking about the game, replacing the usual football chat.
A friend of my son who knew nothing about Rugby League joined his university team because he saw that match. All this was because a British team had become world champions on prime-time TV. Invaluable, irreplaceable publicity.
I wonder what might happen if this season Wigan choose to play the champions of some other nation instead of Australia and still call the match the World Club Challenge? Would the NRL complain? Would they say it had no value because they weren’t taking part? If so, that would be hypocritical.
Maybe we Poms can taunt Penrith into playing if we suggest they are running scared of a Threepeat after losing the last two to
Saints and Wigan. Failing that I think the NRL champions, whoever they are, should be sanctioned for refusing to take part. But I’m not holding my breath.
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