CONGRATULATIONS to Oxford, and commiserations to Cambridge.
The Dark Blues prevailed in Friday’s Varsity Match in what was a huge achievement, even if we accept that neither Oxford nor Cambridge are anywhere near the pinnacle of Student Rugby League, at least in terms of playing standards.
But both universities carry more than a certain cache and it remains the case, as it did when the Varsity fixture was first launched, back in the early 1980s, that the match is – or should be – an important element in the Rugby League calendar.
Not that you’d think so, given the lack of publicity given to the fixture in the build-up.
Nothing came my way from the Rugby Football League and the fixture and results agency GameDay, which tends to be sketchy in terms of forthcoming games, didn’t even list the match in its regular Friday emails.
Nor is the result, as far as I can see, on the RFL’s website.
For those reasons I wasn’t able to provide League Express’s readers with a preview in last Monday’s issue, which I’m certainly not happy about, or include the score or a report in today’s copy.
In fact I only learned of the game by chance when Michael O’Hare, who is a regular contributor to our Mailbag, emailed me last Thursday and mentioned in passing this his son, Thomas, was refereeing the clash.
Congratulations to Thomas on that, but it’s lamentable that I had to find out about the game that way.
The Varsity match now feels a shade uncared for, which certainly wasn’t the case when one stalwart in particular dealt so tirelessly, for many years, with all aspects of the administration and when New Zealander Dick McConnell and BARLA mogul Maurice Oldroyd jointly enjoyed a record of having attended every game since the very first one, at Fulham’s Craven Cottage in 1981.
From 2013 to 2018, indeed, the game was played in the heart of the City of London, at the Honourable Artillery Company, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that Friday (when I’m especially busy with League Express work) was the regular slot I’d certainly have been a perennial attendee.
Perhaps the writing was on the wall when, perhaps in the light of Oxford’s dominance, the decision was made in 2019 to shelve the notion of a neutral venue and play it alternately at the home of one of the two universities.
It’s never quite recovered, in my opinion, and now it seems to be all-but-ignored by the Rugby Football League itself, although I hope I will be corrected about that.
Maybe one (possibly) long-standing factor, which came my way a few years ago on good authority, was that lads who had turned out regularly for at least one of the universities throughout the season would be summarily dropped on the big day, with so-called better players from the rugby union side drafted in.
If that was actually true then it was no way to run a team, in any sport, at any level. In that sense, perhaps the chickens have come home to roost.
I found out, similarly by chance, towards the end of last week, from the RFL’s indefatigable Andrea Murray, that the College Rugby League’s Grand Final is being played this Wednesday, between Castleford Tigers and Hopwood Hall, at Rochdale Mayfield.
It’s a 3.30pm kick off, and my advice is to get there if you can, although there’s a huge counter-attraction in the Midlands, at Loughborough, with a double-header involving two major University Finals.
Liverpool John Moores take on Nottingham at 3.00pm in the National Trophy Final and, at 7.00pm (there’s quite a gap there, which I think was the case last year) the National Championship Final involves Leeds Beckett and Northumbria going head-to-head.
Our readers will, I suspect, be hard-pressed to decide which to attend. But at least they are now properly aware that the matches are taking place, for which no thanks at all to GameDay, but thanks indeed to Andrea Murray, who I’m sure will be very interested to know that a healthy number of players turned up for a taster training session for the Newcastle University Women’s team, which I hope will become reality next season.
Meanwhile, I’ve no doubt that England Universities coaches Adam Houston and Mark Sloan were fully aware of Wednesday’s games and that they will if at all possible be at Loughborough monitoring the talent on show, especially as they named their squad for this year’s representative action late last week.
Earlier in the week, however, I learned the sad news that Bob Pickles passed away on Monday morning, after a spell of ill health, having reached the age of 80 at the beginning of this month.
I knew Bob well, especially through his involvement with the Hunslet RL Ex-Parkside Former Players’ Association.
Membership of that body rests on having played for the club prior to the sale of the Parkside ground in 1973 but Bob, who was a fine goal-kicker, also played for New Hunslet – the club that was immediately launched on Hunslet’s demise by Geoff Gunney and Gordon Murray – and he was very proud of having been the first player to kick a goal through the club’s single-upright goals at Leeds Greyhound Stadium.
A very clear-eyed student of Rugby League, Bob was not only a fine scout for Bradford Northern and Leeds (latterly Rhinos).
He was also an accomplished coach, to which I had an insight when he had a season as a player with us at the Middleton Arms.
I was the fullback and Bob, who played at stand-off, told me to simply run onto his passes at scrums and feed the ball on, with the centres following suit. Lo and behold, we had an overlap every time. It was that simple – so simple, in fact, that it was brilliant.
Things Bob said to me tended to stick in my mind and here’s another one (which I think I’ve mentioned previously in this column). He felt, as regards the professional game, that reducing the number of substitutes from four to two would reduce wage bills enough to fund ‘A’ teams.
I had to agree, with the added bonus that coaches wouldn’t be able to pack their benches with props, to the detriment of creative halfbacks.
Bob Pickles will be badly missed. I’ll provide funeral arrangements as soon as they are known.
