On attaining government, David Cameron is said to have found the prospect of deep and wounding cuts to the BBC "delicious". In much the same rather juvenile way, I must confess that being asked by The Telegraph to write a pro-rugby league polemic feels equally scrumptious if you grew up in the rougher streets of North West England. But while relishing the chance for some small, belated revenge on everyone from the PE teachers at my hopelessly snobbish Grammar School who made us play union even in the northern heartlands of league to the Rugger Buggers who blighted my student discos, the temptation to wage a little desultory class war has to be avoided.
На правительстве, Дэвидом Кэмероном сказано, что он нашел the prospect of deep and wounding cuts to the BBC"delicious". Во многом такое же было в раннем юношестве, я должен признать, что The Telegraph выражает желание написать про Регби Лиг полемические ощущения одинаково восхитительные к обоим разновидностям регби, если вы выросли в грубых улицах Северо-Западной Англии. Но в то время заниматься любимым спортом был очень маленький шанс, к примеру, поздний реванш каждого из учителей физкультуры был в моей безнадежно сноббической гимназии, где нас заставляли играть в Регби Юнион даже в северных землях, где есть в основном Регби Лиг, что омрачало мои студенческие дискотеки, тем не менее, следует избегать соблазна вести время от времени классовую войну.
Why? Because I mustn’t undermine my near watertight case (namely that rugby league is a vastly superior sport in almost every way except establishment acceptance) by petty point scoring, however tempting. I genuinely believe, as many right thinking people do, that contrary to prejudiced assumption and received wisdom, league trumps union every time as an entertainment: faster, more creative, tougher, more skilful.
Зачем? Потому, что я не должен подрывать мое почти неопровержимое положение (а именно, что Регби Лиг является значительно превосходящим спортом почти во всех отношениях, за исключением принятия государственными учреждениями) незначительным успехом, тем не менее заманчиво. Я искренне верю, как это делают многие правильно думающие люди, что вопреки предубежденному высокомерию и общепризнанному непониманию, Регби Лиг каждый раз превосходит Регби Юнион , как представление: быстротой, изобретательностью, жесткостью, более техничным исполнением.
Sam Burgess now plays for union side Bath (left) having switched codes from league (right) теперь играет за клуб RU Dath (слева) изменив код из RL (справа)
Add into this a little social seasoning though, and the dish gets undeniably tastier. We acolytes of the northern code feel hard done to; we're chippy, thanks to our keen sense of injustice that is whetted by our treatment at the hands of a snobbish elite. Last weekend's Rugby League Challenge Cup Final between Leeds and Hull Kingston Rovers drew a crowd of some 90,000 fans plus a global TV audience of millions (league regularly attracts four times as many viewers as union). To add even more significance to the occasion, the match fell on Rugby League’s birthday, it being 120 years since the invention of the sport in the George Hotel, Huddersfield.
Добавьте сюда маленькую социальную приправу, и блюдо получится бесспорно вкуснее. Мы помощники северного кода чувствуем, как трудно его поддерживать; мы раздражительны, благодаря нашему обостренному чувству несправедливости, которое разжигается руками управляющей нами, полной снобизма элиты. Финальный матч Регби Лиг Challenge Cup в минувшие выходные между Лидсом и Халлом Кингстон Роверс привлек толпы поклонников порядка 90,000 фанов, плюс глобальное TV для миллионов телезрителей (league regularly attracts four times as many viewers as union). Следует добавить еще большее значение событию еще и потому, что матч совпал с днем рождения Регби Лиг, причем 120 лет с момента возникновения спорта в George Hotel, именно в Хаддерсфилде.
Celebrations were decidedly muted in our mainstream media though. Much more prominence was given to the fact that union, the posher, southern variety of the original code, was having a jamboree of its own called, with irritating presumption, the Rugby World Cup. I take great pleasure in correcting this to Rugby Union World Cup every time I am called upon to mention it on air. Of such small victories are life’s long wars won.
Rugby divides along social strata. League is northern and working class, union is middle class and largely southern. (Don’t bring Wales into it. It confuses matters.) In 1895, an iron curtain was drawn across the sport. Tired of administrative bullying from the southern elite who ran the game. twenty-two northern clubs voted to secede from the amateur Rugby Football Union or RFU. The breakaway contingent were comprised of players who were industrial workers in mills, mines, foundries and docks, and who unlike their southern counterparts, moneyed and privately educated, couldn’t afford to take time off work to play rugby. So-called ‘broken time payments’ – compensation paid by the clubs – were rather sniffily dismissed by the RFU establishment as contrary to the game’s amateur spirit. So the Northern Football Union, later the Rugby Football League, announced its separation from the RFU. Piqued and indignant the RFU issued lifetime bans to any player who associated with the northern faction.
In effect, those maverick, bolshie twenty-two told the boss to shove it, and thus rugby league was born. Over the next few years, league evolved into a different sport, less reliant on kicking and mauling, generally fleeter, less stop-start and, well, better. But then I would say that. I’m from Wigan, one of those 22 original rebels and the greatest club side in the history of the sport. My dad brought me up to support Wigan, to be hostile to St Helens, Leeds and Warrington and to have a deep suspicion and ingrained lack of respect for union, believing that 30 people was an absurd, unworkable amount for one pitch and that the code was essentially devised to occupy as many public school boys as possible on a wet Wednesday afternoon.
My dad is probably a good example of a league man. Ex-factory worker from Gullick Dobson (maker of hydraulic pit props), Labour party member, stood on the terraces at Central Park watching Wigan from the 50s onwards, days of full employment in the industrial north when 50,000 or so men in overcoats, mufflers and flat caps would cheer on the likes of Billy Boston, Eric Ashton and Vince Karalius. (Incidentally, we should say that this is nothing compared to the 102,575 who watched Warrington play Halifax in 1954. Some say the figure was more like 120,000. It remains the biggest attendance at a rugby match of any kind or code in the Northern Hemisphere. Take that, Wasps, Saracens and ‘Quins.)
We in the North think we have the measure of the Union Man. Range rover, driving gloves, Top Gear fan, thinks Clarkson talks "bloody good sense", tempted by Ukip, tankard behind the bar and a pint before lunch on a Sunday. This is a veritable tsunami of sweeping generalisation of course, smacking of trollish, smouldering resentment. But more expert minds than I have unearthed smoking guns and paper trails revealing Blatter-ish skulduggery down the years from the Union camp. George Clarke claimed recently in the New Statesman that the Nazis persuaded the Vichy government to outlaw rugby league; since then, union dignitaries have deliberately stifled league’s growth in Japan, Serbia, South Africa and Italy. And there's the case of Cambridge student Ady Spencer, who was banned by the RFU from playing in the 1994 Varsity Rugby Union match because he’d played league as youngster in his native Warrington (the incident travelled all the way to Parliament, where it was condemned as “injustice and interference with human rights”).
I might not go that far, but I do concur with my North Eastern friend Neil who once said to me that he did have a sneaking liking for rugby union in that "it was always nice to see coppers and barristers getting knocked about a bit on their day off". Chippy? Nous?
