Who is the greatest rugby league try scorer of them all? Only two players have topped the 500 mark, and despite sharing initials, they couldn’t be more different.
THE WORLD of rugby league got excited back in October 2022 when Ryan Hall joined the list of players to have scored 300 career tries. It’s a remarkable achievement and it would be churlish to decry his feat. So we won’t. But there are 30 other players who have done exactly the same. However, only two of them subsequently went on to top 500 tries. And in this commemorative 500th issue of your favourite rugby league magazine we pay tribute to that exceptional duo, Brian Eyrl Bevan and William “Billy” John Boston.
Both played on the wing, both (just about) have the initials BB, both have grandstands named after them and both have statues built in their honour (Boston has two). But there the similarities end. Pretty much completely.
One looked like the consummate athlete, the archetypal rugby league player. The other most certainly did not. The former was Boston, all power and unstoppable bulk, the latter was Bevan, a sidestepping, shimmying stick of man. Boston bounced defenders out of the way, Bevan never even let them get near him.
Bevan always looked old, even when he wasn’t. Bandaged, bandy legged and balding, he even played without his false teeth. Off the field he was a virtual recluse, taciturn and almost certainly living with obsessive compulsive disorder, such was his fastidiousness. When he wasn’t being called “The Great Bev” he went by the epithet “The Skeleton in Braces”. Boston, on the other hand, was all garrulous energy. Today he’d be the marketing department’s poster boy. Back in the day, away teams used to stick notices up around town on the morning of matches against Wigan announcing “Boston will play”, such was his drawing power.
Boston was head-hunted, Bevan was not. When, in 1953, the scouts from Wigan came knocking on the door of 19-year-old Billy’s front door in Butetown, Cardiff, mightily impressed with his rugby union performances for the Royal Signals, they offered him £1,000 to sign. His mother demanded £3,000, and they paid up immediately. He was furious with his mum for signing away his future but, well aware he would never be able to play union for Wales because he was black, he later said it was the best mistake his mother ever made.
Bevan, meanwhile, was an ex-Eastern Suburbs player from Sydney, who found himself in England after serving with the Australian Navy in the Second World War. In late 1945, he touted himself around the rugby league clubs of northern England. Leeds and Hunslet took one look at his scrawny frame and said no thanks. Warrington, however, were more canny and gave him a trial in their A team. He blew the opposition apart and was offered a contract. For only a tenth of what Boston was offered in his kitchen eight years later, Bevan repaid his club many times over.
That both made their mark with English clubs has a certain irony, as neither came from that country, let alone the north. Boston was Welsh, Bevan was Australian (and, for what it’s worth, the player third on the all-time try-scoring list is a southerner, born to Nigerian parents – Martin Offiah). But all found fame and reverence in the sport forged in northern England.
Bevan and Boston faced each other frequently – their careers overlapping by eight seasons – and both declared that the other was the winger they feared the most. By the time they retired Bevan had notched 796 tries, Boston 571. And there they have stayed, atop the try-scoring charts seemingly in perpetuity.
As a postscript, the stark differences between the two continued after they retired. The loquacious and effusive Boston became a pub landlord while Bevan, among other jobs, became a hairdresser. Yes a hairdresser.
Barbering and pulling pints aside, could anybody today achieve what they did? It seems unlikely. Defences are far better organised – indeed modern-day coaching is predicated on the belief that sound defence rather than mercurial attack wins matches. Training techniques and the demands of rugby league today mean that body shapes for all playing positions are similar. Forwards are quicker and more nimble than they were in the post-war era, and play far fewer games than they once did. And while Billy Boston’s physique would perhaps still pay dividends today, he would be up against wingers of similar bulk. Meanwhile, Brian Bevan would have found it harder to find the space to dance around the defenders as he once did. Back in his day, unlimited tackling and 30 scrums or more left props and second-rowers leaden-footed on poorer playing surfaces. And crucially, there were no substitutes in those days.
That’s not to say both players couldn’t be successful today. They could, and perhaps devastatingly so. But the frequency with which they could showcase their abilities would be greatly reduced, defences today are all too quick to stifle broken-field opportunities. And – for better or worse – they would have to adapt to the demands of modern rugby league. While Billy Boston had the physique of a modern-day player, we must also hope that there is still a place in rugby league for the likes of a wiry, jinking winger who can bring the crowd to its feet.
Rugby league historian Robert Gate had this to say about Boston: “It is doubtful if any other player in the game’s history ever made a crowd tingle as much as Boston… and who caused a feeling of utter dread for opposing supporters emanating from the realisation that no matter how well organised the defence seemed, no matter how many opponents barred his progress, the great man was still likely to find a way through.”
And in describing Bevan, he made an artful point of illustrating the antithesis of his extraordinary ability, writing simply: “No one went to a rugby league ground to watch Brian Bevan tackle.”
It may be something of a cliché but it is almost certainly true. We shall never see their like again. The game has changed irrevocably since the days Brian Bevan and Billy Boston were stalking the field and notching up 1367 tries between them. Dissimilar they may have been, but their scoring feats mean they remain forever linked.
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 500 (September 2024)
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