This September, Sheffield Eagles will celebrate the fortieth anniversary as a rugby league club. They’ve had ups and downs in that time, but they are still flying the flag in the steel city.
IT’S coming up to 40 years since the name Sheffield Eagles first appeared among the rugby league results.
And as the game’s great survivors plot a future path which includes being established at a community sports hub in the heart of the steel city when the half-century is reached, they are more than happy to reflect on a very eventful past.
The Eagles, via their National Lottery-funded heritage project initiative, have a series of anniversary events in the pipeline to mark an anniversary milestone which will be reached almost 25 years after the creation of the current version of the club following the controversial merger of the original with Huddersfield Giants.
The list includes ’40 from 40 Years’ – an exhibition which highlights a player from each campaign so far – ’40 Years of Shirts’ (no doubt including that worn by one of the characters in the 1997 blockbuster film The Full Monty) and a celebration dinner in September.
Also that month, the league clash with Bradford Bulls will serve as this year’s club ‘heritage game’.
The Championship meeting at the Olympic Legacy Park on Sunday, 8th September has been selected because it’s the closest home match to the Eagles’ first-ever on Sunday, 2nd September, 1984.
That was against Rochdale Hornets at Owlerton Greyhound Stadium, not far from Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough home and a venue arrived at after initial plans to use Sheffield United’s Bramall Lane fell through.
Indeed it’s a touch ironic that the Eagles are eyeing a new stadium which they will share with non-league Sheffield FC, well-known as the world’s first football club (they were founded in 1857), and which will be part of a multi-sports complex in the Meadowhead area of the city.
For when Gary Hetherington announced his intention to launch a senior rugby league club, many predicted the stranglehold the round-ball game had on Sheffield when it came to sport meant a professional oval-ball team could never take off, never mind fly high.
It’s said Hetherington, now chief executive of Leeds Rhinos but back then the captain of Huddersfield and head of the first players’ union, decided to join forces with his wife Kath and form a new team after being turned down for the coaching job at York, where he had previously played, at the age of 27.
He insisted Sheffield, with its then-640,000 population and large industrial and commercial base, had real potential as a location of league and pressed ahead with a plan which took a few years to come to fruition, while in the meantime, playing hooker for another expansion side, Kent Invicta.
Having originally hoped to enter the Second Division in 1983-84, Hetherington had to apply the brakes as he tried to solve issues over a ground and sponsorship.
The Eagles were finally admitted, along with another new club Mansfield Marksman, at a special meeting of existing RFL clubs on 18th April, 1984, both having to show funding of at least £50,000 as well as a ten-year lease on their ground (Owlerton and Mansfield Town Football Club’s Field Mill respectively) while at the same time agreeing that for the first season, neither shared in the distribution of broadcast fees, the levy fund or any league profits.
With Carlisle, Fulham, Kent (later Southend Invicta) and Cardiff City (who became Bridgend) having appeared on the scene in the previous few years, it took the total RFL membership to 36 clubs, equalling the record set when a major restructure of the league took place back in 1902.
Hetherington was the Eagles’ owner, general manager and team manager as well as a player, and set about recruiting a coach (former Featherstone and York forward and Doncaster chief Alan Rhodes) and assembling a team.
The first signing was Daryl Powell, the sought-after Great Britain Under-19 centre who was with Castleford amateur club Redhill, while Hemsworth Miners second-rower Ian Jowitt was also snapped up.
The latter went on to play for Wakefield Trinity, where his son Max Jowitt is now coached by Powell, who as well as playing for Keighley Cougars, Leeds and Great Britain, had spells in charge of Keighley, Leeds, Featherstone Rovers, Castleford Tigers and Warrington Wolves before his appointment by Wakefield in September.
Hetherington and Rhodes recruited experience in the form of former Featherstone, Hull and Great Britain front rower Vince Farrar, lured out of retirement as a result of the miners’ strike, Wakefield prop Billy Harris, York loose-forward Paul McDermott and Doncaster fullback Andy Tyers, now an Eagles director.
Other early arrivals included a pair of Mark Campbells, one of whom went on to both play for and become chairman of Featherstone, and Dave Alred, a former Bristol PE teacher who later became one of the most renowned rugby union goal-kicking and sports performance coaches going.
Alred had played union and gridiron but only briefly dabbled in league in the student game and with Keighley.
In the event, he played only twice for Sheffield, but is in the record books as being in the first-ever line-up, featuring on the wing and landing two goals in a 29-10 victory in front of 1,425.
The full side was: Tyers, Ray Smith, Powell, Mark Q Campbell, Alred, Steve Robinson, Paul Welsh, Harris, Hetherington, Farrar, Steve Cooper, Jowitt, McDermott. Substitutes: Mark S Campbell (the future Featherstone chairman), John Gregory.
McDermott scored a hat-trick of tries and Harris two while Robinson also crossed and Hetherington landed a field-goal.
The Eagles, who survived a mid-campaign financial crisis, were to win only eight of their 28 league games, and finished up 17th out of 20, but they were on their way.
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 495 (April 2024)
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