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Has rugby league been asking itself all the wrong questions for the last 130 years?
‘I say with Mark Twain’s bold, bad boy, that we glory in the sentence of outlawry pronounced on us, as freeing us from the tyrannical bondage of the English Union.’
Or so read a letter to the Yorkshire Post in September 1895. The sport of rugby league was less than a month old and rebellion was in the air. The revolution had begun.
In the 130 years since, that spirit has been eroded from the sport. Rugby league, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, now sees itself as a downtrodden game permanently consigned to the fringes, obsessed with asking itself what it is doing wrong.
Perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong questions all along. Rather than worry about what rugby league is getting wrong, without being able to offer an alternative on how to things might change, we’re here to celebrate everything rugby league is and has been doing right to still be here over a century later.
As the musician Jake Thackray once wrote after watching the great Lewis Jones get the ball under his own posts in a game between Leeds and Hull KR at Headingley, before jinking and ghosting, sliding and drifting, shimmying, dummying, stopping, bullocking and swooping through the entire KR team before finally putting the ball ‘right tidy under their sticks’:
‘Ever since I’ve been conscious that the only class is real class.’
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