"Good Morning From Another Rugby League Town…"

When I heard that Goole Vikings were on the verge of entering the semi-professional ranks, as a rugby league fan, I found myself firstly filled with surprise, then a touch of intrigue, followed by the genuine hope that it’d actually come to fruition.

Firstly, as a lover of the sport, it just makes perfect sense. Geographically it slots in flawlessly on the M62 corridor, seamlessly bridging the gap between the West Yorkshire triumvirate of Castleford, Wakefield, and Featherstone and the Hull clubs to the East, while also sitting between York and Doncaster. It’s almost as if it was made to measure for the sport.

Taking my rugby league hat off, however, I have to confess that I immediately felt a vested interest for another reason. Since 2016, I’ve spent a lot of time in Goole as I joined a band, Sandra’s Wedding, who are from the town. For context, having never visited Goole in my life before that, I’ve subsequently come to spend an awful lot of time there and grown really fond of it. It's only twenty miles down the M62 from my hometown of Castleford, and has come to feel like a second home of sorts. Industrial towns do have similarities that are easy to spot and also a little intangible, but Goole’s identity as a former ship-building town mirrors Castleford’s mining heritage in the respect that it is still looming in the present, despite the industries being consigned to the past. The clues are there in the architecture, the streets, the skyline — and it is all the better for it. Perhaps I’m romanticising bricks and mortar, but I’d challenge anyone to drive down the docks at Goole on an evening as the water shimmers with imposing machinery looming above and not find it to be eerily calm and beautiful.

I digress. Joe, the singer in Sandra’s Wedding, has always had a real curiosity about my interest in rugby league. He loves his football and cricket, but wasn’t an aficionado of rugby league himself. For a while I thought he might just see my love affair with Cas as a quirky inconvenience to the band that meant I’d skive rehearsals to drive to Warrington and watch us get hammered instead of turning up on guitar, but as time went on I could sense he was genuinely interested. He started dropping me a text if he’d caught a televised game to see what I thought or if we’d won. We’d chat about what it means to come from a working class town, the parallels between Castleford and Goole, and how having a team really gives your town a sense of identity. So much so, he even took me by surprise when he said, “Oh, by the way, I think we’re going to call our next record ‘Another Rugby League Town’.”

So when I saw the Vikings making the shortlist to enter the sport’s third tier, Joe was the first person to come to mind. As someone who is fiercely proud of his hometown I knew he’d love to see it come to fruition. When I asked him what he thought, he simply replied, “Eh, we’ll be hammering Cas next.” As the weeks went by we were trading texts at an alarming rate, watching them get accepted to League One, build a team, stun London with a remarkable result in their opening match, and win their first 1895 Cup game. His excitement and curiosity was becoming more palpable. You could also argue, given Cas’ result in the Challenge Cup at Bradford, he might not be far off the mark with his prediction.

We both decided it was time to go to a game, and the first league match against Midland Hurricanes seemed the perfect place to start. I had a morbid curiosity to see what he’d think of it all. Maybe subconsciously I just wanted him to have suffer the same punishment I do on a weekly basis watching Cas put me through a ringer. Who knows? But the idea of going along with Joe interested me predominantly because he is exactly the sort of person who is emblematic of what Goole or any other town starting a team from scratch has to capture.

They need people who want to support a new project, people with an interest in sport who may not have been to many rugby league games, and most importantly, people willing to watch something they may not quite understand. It’s probably safe to say many Super League season ticket holders still don’t quite fully comprehend the finer points of the rules, never mind people expected to pay good money to watch something they might not have engaged with much before. After years of watching clubs pop up over the years — from your Crusaders to your Cornwalls — I have always been fascinated to see what it looks like when a team is starting from the ground up in this way.

“I’ve brought a brolly,” Joe asks as we headed to the Victoria Pleasure Grounds on a rainy, windy Sunday. “Do you do that at a rugby game?” The ground is currently under construction, but despite being in a band that has a song named after this very stadium, it is shamefully only my first visit to the Pleasure Grounds. It feels alarmingly familiar to walking down Wheldon Road, past the terraces of houses, red brick everywhere — the main difference being iconic salt and pepper pot water towers looming over the stadium that make for a wholly unique backdrop.

Straight away, I’m buoyed by how well organised the place is and just how much is going on — plenty of people are packed under the stand, with kids running around, braving the conditions, while a giant tepee greets you on the way in. Only in rugby league could you walk into a venue where you’ve got a trendy selection of beer and gin, a race track, and people dressed up as actual Vikings. It’s a sensory overload and the game hasn’t even kicked off yet. It fills me with heart to notice the amount of hats and shirts of other clubs too — a couple of Leeds, plenty of Hull FC, a few Hull KR hats. There is a real feeling of goodwill from more established fan bases. More encouraging, however, is the amount of Goole shirts and merchandise on display.

While Joe drifts off for a pre-match pint, I remember how funny it is going to a game when Castleford aren’t involved. Whenever this happens I find myself feeling a little like Louis Theroux watching some weird events unfold, all the while feeling a sense of detachment in the way you can’t when your own team is involved. You can observe events rather than feeling part of them; nodding, humming, feeling wise. A dodgy refereeing call isn’t going to ruin my weekend in the same way that it would if it involved Cas and reduced me to an angry idiot frothing at the mouth. Once the game kicks off, it is riveting and you simply can’t take your eyes off it. It’s a tough slog, and without a noisier Super League crowd, I can hear every single collision. Both sides are full of uncompromising players and none take a backwards step. Goole have assembled a great squad with players who have done it all — Jamie Shaul, Brett Ferres, Thomas Minns — giving glimpses of their Super League quality in what is a real arm wrestle for the purists.

As the game unfolds and the wind and rain drives across the pitch, I can’t help but admire the grit and determination with the quality of the game holding up even in tough conditions. Midlands in particular throw some risky offloads in their own twenty. As Jack Coventry puts in a particularly crunching hit, Joe turns and asks, “Can you do that? How come that other one wasn’t allowed?” Welcome to the nuances of rugby league. At half-time we serendipitously run into a photographer called Rob. As fate would have it, the band had been recording a couple of days before and Rob asked to come and take some shots of the band. Joe clocks him standing on the touchline, admirably holding his post despite the weather, and we go to chat with him. He later spots us in the crowd and takes an unsuspecting photo of Joe mid-pint, and me talking nonsense clad in my Cas beanie, like an anaemic version of Noddy. We’re not even photogenic as a band, never mind mid-conversation freezing our bollocks off at a match.

After Joe nips to the gents and we mooch around in the purgatory of half-time, a bloke armed with toilet rolls shouts over to Joe, “Eh, they think it's all glamour and you’ve got your own box with air conditioning — not a chance.” It happens to be Andy Barras, someone Joe knows who is on the board of the fledgling club. It’s fascinating to talk to someone involved from the inception, as he explains the risks involved, the vetting process, and the amount of toil(et rolls) for all involved. Even though as spectators we all know it costs money to make things happen, it’s quite sobering to hear the numbers broken down on the costs from insurance to the price of security barriers. As a Cas fan who has heard their owners and board get more than their fair share of stick, I remember the old adage ‘there is no money in rugby league clubs’ is painfully true.

The game swings back and forth, with the players serving up a game far more entertaining than it has any right to be. The highlight of the afternoon is easily Jamie Shaul’s try off a well worked break down the left hand side, but just as Goole go ahead, Midlands score a late try to snatch the game. As the hooter sounds and the players trudge off, the small contingent of noisy Midlands fans celebrate while there is a palpable disappointment among the home support. I comment to Joe what a good thing this actually is — even though defeat is never nice, the fact you can tell people are bothered shows that even after one league game, they actually care. After some of the performances my own team served up in uncompetitive lop sided fixtures under Andy Last and Craig Lingard, I became apathetic — so to see five hundred people in miserable, grim weather conditions to boot — suddenly have an emotional attachment to a team and feel hard done by, surely that bodes well?

As we splash through the rain, I ask Joe for his thoughts. I’m really curious to hear what my band mate made of his first game. Without missing a beat he responds, “I think it was better when they wore big jumpers and collars.” He follows it up with a more measured response. “It’s just great that the town and so many people from the community were here watching. Even with the horrible weather, five hundred people turned out. To be honest I wasn’t sure I’d be bothered about sticking until the end when it was raining, but I didn’t think it'd make me feel as energised as this. It was a genuinely exciting finish, even if we came out the wrong side of the score.”

Feeling a bit like I was asking him questions that made me sound like we were on Channel Four’s Four In A Bed, I ask the all important one: would you go back?

“I’ll go to more games, definitely,” he says without hesitation. “I do need to get to grips with the rules because if you don’t know what’s going on it’s quite hard to follow.” It hasn’t stopped some fans and even a couple of referees I’ve seen over the years. “Obviously I get the basics and scoring system, but even slight little quirks or technicalities leave me lost. I dunno, maybe just going with it and not quite understanding everything is part of the fun. But I’ll be back, absolutely.”

As we trudge to the pub to warm up, it’s a real eye opener to see the game again through fresh eyes, and I’m excited about the idea of a new convert in tow along with — dare I say it — a new ‘second team’ of my own. The first song I worked on with Joe was called Hollywood. It contains the line ‘this ain’t Hollywood... it’s a former ship-building town.’ That may well be the case, especially on a windy, muddy Sunday afternoon, but I’m just hopeful that in their own way Goole Vikings can write some Hollywood rugby league headlines of their own. Looking at what the board, players, and all in the town involved have done so far, they certainly deserve it. ⬧