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THE BIRTH OF A NEW ERA AND A NEW EXCITING SPORTING CODE IN ENGLAND

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--THE BEGINNING--

When Rugby League was founded it wasn't professional, its rules were no different to rugby union - and it wasn't even called Rugby League. All those changes came later. The Northern Union, as it was initially known, rose out of the economic and class differences between the rulers of Rugby Union and the strongest northern clubs. Drawing on a far wider social base than the upper and middle-class clubs of the south, they wanted to compensate players for income lost due to playing the game - so-called "broken time". When they pursued this demand at the 1893 Annual Meeting of the Rugby Union, they were outvoted.Seeing no sign of compromise, 21 leading clubs chose to leave the union and set up their own organisation, the Northern Rugby Football Union, in 1895. In this early form the game was explicitly anti-professional - players were banned if they had no job, or belonged to what were regarded as unrespectable trades. And it was played to the same rules as previously. That both of these rapidly changed reflected features running through rugby league's 104-year history. It has always been prepared to adapt its rules to make the game more attractive to spectators. It has always aimed to expand beyond its initial boundaries in Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire. And its relationship with rugby union has always been difficult. Professionalism was permitted by 1899, although players were still required to be in full-time work. Changes governing what happened on the field had started before that - the line-out was abolished as early as 1897 and by 1906 league had taken on the 13-a-side format and the play-the-ball after a tackle that remain fundamental to it.

--THE EXPANSION--

The Northern Union's early years were unstable in terms of membership and organisation. Clubs were gained and lost - Manningham, the first ever champions, were reborn early in the new century as Bradford City Football Club. Several attempts were made to break out of what we now call the M62 corridor, with a number of teams established in Wales and others in South Shields and Coventry. None lasted very long. But league's missionary urge was reflected in the choice of venues for the test matches played by the early touring teams - the 1908 New Zealanders started at Leeds, but then played at Chelsea and Cheltenham while the 1909 Australians faced Great Britain at Queens Park Rangers, Newcastle and Birmingham. Australasia was league's earliest, and most important expansion. Union players angered by the restrictive attitudes of the New Zealand and Australian unions chose to break away and play league. From the start they had sufficient talent to compete - it took Great Britain six goes to beat Australia for the first time. Some of their best players were offered contracts by British clubs. Some accepted them, and became stars of the British game, helping initiate one of its most important features. At the same time as reflecting intense highly localised loyalties, league is also cosmopolitan, prepared not only to accept but to celebrate gifted outsiders. Among those imports was winger Albert Rosenfeld, whose 80 tries for Huddersfield in 1913-4 remain a record today. A great player in his own right, he played in the same team as an even greater one - centre Harold Wagstaff. The Huddersfield team of the years immediately before the First World War was one of the greatest in leagues history - they won 12 of the 16 trophies available to them between 1911 and 1915, peaking in 1914-5. Then they won all four trophies, winning their three finals by record margins. Their 37-3 win over St Helens remains the most one-sided of all Challenge Cup Finals. Hunslet (1907-8) and Swinton (1927-8) were the other "all four" teams. Wagstaff led Great Britain in the first great international match, the "Rorke's Drift" test at Sydney in 1914, so called because they won 14-6 in spite of finishing with only 10 men due to injuries.

--BETWEEN THE WARS--

Another key player in that Huddersfield side was goalkicker Ben Gronow, one of the hundreds of Welshmen who have made an impact in league. Union always had a broader social base in Wales than in the other home countries, and for most of league's history there has been a steady flow of players attracted by the chance to combine their other jobs with extra income from playing rugby. This was particularly true as the Welsh economy suffered in the interwar years. Those who came north then included two of the game's immortals. Jim Sullivan played for Wigan from 1921 to 1946 and his career marks of 928 matches and 2867 points are still all-time records. Gus Risman's career lasted from 1929 to 1954. A star of the great Salford teams of the 1930s, the original Red Devils, so labelled by French journalists long before Manchester United stole the name, he founded one of the game's most famous dynasties. League had been introduced into France in 1934, but was suppressed under the collaborationist Vichy government which co-existed with the Nazi occupation between 1940 and 1944.

--MID CENTURY--

The immediate postwar period was one of prosperity as record crowds were attracted to the game. Interwar attempts at expansion in London, Wales and the North-East had been unsuccessful and short-lived. But after 1945 there was a successful move into Cumbria. Workington, led by Risman, won both Championship and Challenge Cup within six years of joining the league. In 1947 Barrow's Roy Francis was the first of a long line of great black players, many of them Welsh, to be capped by Great Britain. Clive Sullivan was to be, in the 1970s, the first black captain of any British national team, a record of which league is justly proud. The reborn French game, inspired by the brilliant full-back Puig Aubert, also enjoyed its greatest era, hosting the first World Cup in 1954 and reaching the final before losing to Great Britain. League continued to produce great players like the mercurial half-back Alex Murphy, all-time points record holder Neil Fox and Wigan's blockbusting Welsh winger Billy Boston. Their skills were known to a wider audience as national television coverage started, making journalist Eddie Waring one of the most familiar and most caricatured voices in Britain. But from the early 1950s gates declined sharply. That decline, and decay at the game's grass roots, led to reforms in the 1960s. The limited-tackle rule - first four, then six - was intended to make it more open and attractive. The first Sunday matches were allowed in 1967, and this increasingly became league's day in the attempt to evade competition from football and shopping. The foundation of the Universities and Colleges Rugby League in 1969 and the British Amateur Rugby League in 1973 responded to the need to develop the game below professional level.

--THE MODERN ERA--

That year also saw the single league, incorporating Yorkshire and Lancashire competitions, which had existed for all but two of the previous 70 years cut into two divisions. The Yorkshire and Lancashire Cups would follow the county leagues into oblivion in the early 1990s. The foundation of Fulham in 1980 inaugurated a new era of expansion which was to be far longer-lasting than previous attempts and produce one unquestioned success in Sheffield Eagles. But the two great teams of the 1980s were from more traditional locations. Australian league, incorporating lessons from American football, reached new levels of athleticism and power at a time when a ban on imported players made Britain less aware of overseas developments than previously. The 1982 Kangaroos led by Max Krilich and including such greats as Peter Sterling, Wayne Pearce and Mal Meninga, struck Northern England with the same devastating force as the Vikings 1,000 years before. Scoring 99 points in three tests, they inaugurated an era of Australian dominance which continues to this day, reflected as much by the proliferation of Oz coaching and playing talent at the highest levels of the British game as in test match results. Domestically Wigan set new standards. No team had previously won a national trophy three times in a row. Wigan won the Challenge Cup every year between 1988 and 1995, including six consecutive championship and cup doubles between 1990 and 1995.At the same time as producing authentic home-grown stars like Shaun Edwards, Denis Betts and Andy Farrell, Wigan attracted the cream of British talent - players like Ellery Hanley, Martin Offiah, Andy Platt and Joe Lydon - as well as high-class imports like the Iro brothers and long-serving Graeme West. Their excellence was reinforced by moving to full-time professionalism in a game which had hung on to its tradition of small-scale capitalism based on players who also had other jobs.

--SUPER LEAGUE AND THE PESENT GAME--

The game's failure to seriously expand its fan base led to endless discussion of possible reforms and reorganisations during the Eighties and early Nineties. These changes arrived all at once in the game's Big Bang, suitably enough in the Centenary Year of 1995, when it was announced that the professional game would move to summer from 1996, with the top clubs forming Super League, funded by an exclusive television contract with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. At the same time civil war broke out in Australia with Murdoch backing a coup against the established Australian Rugby League via a new Super League. This battle took three years to settle, meaning that while the Centenary World Cup was the most widely-based yet with Tonga, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and West Samoa providing some memorable rugby, the Australian team that won represented only around half the strength of the game down under.The new structures are still on trial. The Wigan stranglehold was finally broken, with St Helens and Bradford Bulls - the club who took most wholeheartedly to the summer game and its enhanced marketing possibilities - taking the first two titles. Full-time professionalism is now the norm in Super League. Sky television coverage has brought new levels of technical expertise, but unavoidably only to an audience of the converted. The underlying fan base appears to have expanded only marginally, and there are worries over the future of clubs - and entire regions like Cumbria - outside Super League. Australia continues to dominate - their clubs were embarrassingly superior in the 1998 World Club Cup - and provides the bulk of Super League coaches.