freelanceintellectual.com

The 2008 Carnegie Challenge Cup final

On Saturday I was kindly offered a ticket to the Rugby League Challenge Cup final - a fabulous ticket, actually, in one of the prawn sandwich boxes that dominate all major sporting arenas these days. I manged to get this offer though because it seems no one in corporate England wanted to come to this game; they're all slaves to the money-vampire soccer, I suppose. So, the undead not filling their posh seats, there were vast acres of space for crashers like me. I even managed to get free beer, which was quite a blag I thought. This was my first Challenge Cup final for eighteen years. I used to come here most years for some time; from 1975, when Warrington failed pathetically to live up to my ten-year-old wish for them to win, in spite of John Bevan's early try, to 1980, the famous all-Hull final. After that something strange happens: I can't recall exactly when I wasn't there, except for being certain I was there to see Castleford beat Hull KR in 1986 and to see Warrington disappointed yet again in 1990. Odd, isn't it, how aging makes you forget what's more recent rather than the old stuff. I can still see Bevan saluting to the crowd after that 1975 touchdown.

This used to be a great sport, and a great final. Certainly the Challenge Cup is the best trophy sport has to offer, I reckon: it's a proper Victorian cup, more elaborate than soccer's FA Cup and much more substantial that any modern trophy. Worth lifting. But I've despaired a bit for rugby league in recent years. The game I grew up with and played half-decently as a schoolboy became boring, I'm sorry to say, in the 1990s, not because of any effect of aging this time - I've never gone off the game - but because of money. A couple of years of success from Wigan - who ten years or so before had been a joke, a team everyone knew they'd beat easily, and who'd once been relegated - and their crowds swelled, they recruited all the best players, and won this cup eight years in a row. If I remember right, they won the league most of those years, too. It wasn't fair, not fair in that childish way that makes you go off the game and go in to watch telly instead. I have to admit I got sick of it. It wasn't just watching Wigan win all the time. It was all the time knowing they'd win. In 1990 for instance, we turned up hopefully and Mike Gregory scored for Warrington, but I think very few people really believed we would beat Wigan that day.

The ludicrous thing is that even Wigan didn't make money during those years of dominance: they paid out so much in players' wages that they had to win everything to balance the books. Since then, there's been a little improvement. There's now a salary cap so that in theory at least one team can't bag all the best players. I wonder, though, what tricks are used to circumvent this rule. While there's no longer a monopoly on success, there's certainly an oligopoly, with St. Helens and Leeds the top two sides. St Helens have now won the cup for the last three years, and have topped the league for the last three years, too. They're currently top of this year's superleague, with Leeds in second place. So rugby league is still not free of the curse of predictability. It's also, ludicrously, turned itself into a summer game to fit the Sky Sports schedules. The idea of rugby as a summer sport seems to me laughable I must say. Only the rubbishness of the last couple of summers has made sense of it.

So I took all that baggage with me to the game, hoping for a real match but expecting Saints to steamroller Hull. Well, it wasn't quite like that. Saints did indeed get off to a good start, with an easy try for Gidley and a soft one from an inerception by Meli. Hull seemed overawed and flat-footed - there was little energy or movement from the line when Hull had the ball, and too often they played one-man rugby. Either that or the acting half-back's only option was to hand the ball to someone who looked unenthusiastic about driving for yards. This was in marked contrast to what Saints did on the ball - they always had options, or seemed to, with more than one man running on to a pass at speed. But Hull plugged away gamely and just about kept themselves in the game, till an immense piece of luck - an interception by Yeaman and a long-range score bringing them, astonishingly, within four points. Hull scored again and led at one point, and with a quarter of an hour or so to go it looked possible they might just sneak this cup in spite of being the clearly inferior side; St Helens, though, had one or two more tricks to play, and came out well ahead by the end. This turned out a much better game than might have been expected - Hull had an awful lot of luck and this could easily have been a pasting.

So I came home a bit encouraged about rugby league. And yet. Much more needs to be done to stop money and the short-term irrational interests of clubs from keeping this sport down. It could be so much stronger - but never will be until its competitions are much more open and the full enthusiasm of all its big audiences is roused, not just in St Helens and Leeds but also in Bradford, Castleford, Warrington, Hull, Salford, Halifax and Widnes. My plan would be to have central salary negotiations, agreed with the rugby league, so that a player would be paid the same whatever club he moved from or to (with the richer clubs subsidising the system if need be), together with a rigorous audit system that pursued and prosecuted - for fraud - any club making illegal payments or giving unusual perks to its players. I know this all sounds somewhat draconian and interventionist, but then in the North we're not afraid of intervention; and this sport has shown itself so vulnerable to the distorting effects of money that a strong system needs putting in place.

One last word in praise of St Helens: they, unlike other clubs, have not chosen a stupid infantilised name like Leeds "Rhinos", Castleford "Tigers" or (God help us) Warrington "Wolves". If you ever see a Wolf in Warrington, a Tiger in Castleford or a Rhino in Leeds, please let me know.