Emergency Surgery Needed As History Withers On The Vine
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday October 21, 1994
THE pitch slopes crazily downhill from one dead-ball line blocked off by makeshift wooden shuttering to the other bound by an untended, grassy bank.
Before the match, club volunteers hire out off-cuts of carpet at 50 pence each to protect the posteriors of patrons sitting in the main stand, which was bought second-hand from a local soccer club. And the half-time refreshments are pies, swimming in mushy, dayglo green peas.
Welcome to Mount Pleasant, home ground of Batley Rugby League Football Club, known as the Gallant Youths since 1897 when a bunch of local kids scored a famous Challenge Cup win against a more experienced St Helens team.
On this damp, October afternoon, both names seems peculiarly inappropriate. An unpleasant chill wind whips bruised, spitting clouds across The Mount, perched precariously atop a bluff overlooking the terraced rows of homes of the old Yorkshire textile town. And the "youths" have included in their squad, alongside three little-known Australian imports, the former international Jeff Grayshon, at 46 believed to be the oldest man still playing first-grade football anywhere in the world.
"It's good to have an old head, even if it's on a very old body," jokes club chairman Stephen Ball, one of three directors who mortgaged their homes five years ago to save the club from being wound-up by creditors.
As he proudly points out, Batley was one of the original clubs that met in the back bar of the George Hotel, Huddersfield, about 15km away, to form the league in 1895.
"We couldn't let a club with so much tradition and loyalty die," Ball said
Just along the M62 motorway from Batley, the all-conquering Kangaroos are playing Halifax in their final match before the first Test against Great Britain. But there is no better place than Batley to poke among the real grassroots of British rugby league, and assess its strengths and weaknesses on the eve of another Ashes series.
For, after 114 years of heroic, if often haphazard, existence, second-division Batley is probably still more representative of British rugby league's present state than perennial premiers Wigan with its high-priced imports, groaning trophy cabinet and cheesecake stars, such as Phil Clarke, darling of the Sunday newspaper supplements.
Today, Batley fans just want their team to maintain its unbeaten home record and promotion push by beating Lancashire rivals Swinton.
But some can see beyond their own muddy, back paddock. While most carry the team's maroon and orange colours, adorned with the name of the sponsor and principal employer in the town, Fox's biscuits, a couple of drinkers in the nearby Taverners Club wear T-shirts bearing the slogan "Kangaroo Busters" and a picture of a lion doing unspeakable things to a Skippy.
It turns out to be less prophecy or promise than a statement of wishful thinking. "We're always a chance at Wembley, what with the atmosphere an all,"one of the fans says.
Behind the British bluster and bravado, this is the common, considered view. There is no shortage of pundits offering advice on "How to beat the gods from Oz", as author and football fanatic Colin Welland put it recently.
He believes the Poms have enough "up the sleeve conjurors" to win.
Similarly, Great Britain's new coach, encouraged by the absence of his little Balmain mate Benny Elias, is confident - at least publicly - that his team has the speed to outrun the Australians; his captain, Shaun Edwards, believes concentrated defence could deny the Kangaroos, while the ubiquitous Phil Clarke has gone on record as saying "cockiness could be the visitors'undoing".
And so on. But realistically, few pundits - and certainly no bookmakers, who are offering 4-1 against Australian losing a Test - give Britain a chance of breaking the Kangaroos' 21-year-old stranglehold on the Ashes. Most local experts concede that after closing the talent gap in 1990 and again in 1992, Britain have fallen further behind in the past two years.
Former Balmain and Kangaroos fullback Garry Jack, now in his second year as coach of first-division side Salford, believes Australia could put out two, possibly even three, teams capable of beating Britain.
"Mate, you'd have to say the Poms have been going backwards," he said. "At the same time Australia has really kicked on again. The skill level has just improved tremendously since the last tour."
Ian Clayton, author and publisher of the best-selling rugby league book When Push Comes to Shove, agreed, though he described the "new revolution" in different terms: "In effect, Australia deconstructed the game back in the 1970s, breaking it down into its component parts and reassembling them in a way that was radically different.
"For example, traditional ideas about attack and defence were turned upside down as Australia demonstrated the importance of defending in your opponents'half."
No sooner had British teams - often coached, or substantially manned, by imported Australians - caught up with that revolution than another had occurred. Encouraged by the new 10m rule and faster play-the-balls, Clayton said, the Australians had returned to a more classical style of rugby league, keeping the ball moving, but this time with far faster, fitter, stronger and skillful forwards.
This enables them to play what TV interviewer Michael Parkinson, a Barnsley boy, calls the rugby league equivalent of "total football".
Whatever it is called, total, neo-classical or post-modernist football, the British are again being forced to play catch-up against the wondrous "Wizards of Oz", as they are routinely described in Yorkshire. As Welland wrote in last week's Observer: "Watching the Aussies on the field is a glimpse of what I dream will be our future."
Tripping over metaphors in his enthusiasm, Welland went on: "Their demeanor, turnout, style are all fruits of their humming rugby league machine which, lubricated as it is by the adrenaline of national support, produces a superb product ... when set against it, our honest, homespun but backwatered variety seems a light year away."
Thus Batley, where on an autumn afternoon so gloomy the floodlights are switched on by 3.30 pm and in front of 11,272 fans, the second biggest crowd of the season at The Mount, many of the deficiencies of British football go on display in an intense if uninspiring table-top encounter.
The facilities, which are shared with former English league soccer club Bradford Park Avenue, are, apart from the Heritage Stand opened in 1989, decrepit. Players and officials have a perilous 50m walk across a public car park, where kids are kicking a ball around, from changing shed to paddock.
Apart from sloping vertiginously off towards Leeds, the pitch is already badly cut up despite recent dry weather. By February it will be like Flanders Field.
By Australian standards, at least, the refereeing is not so much poor or even erratic as consistently over-indulgent, ensuring the game becomes a heavyweight waltz, slow, slow, quick, quick, slow. Though a Swinton player is marched for a late, high tackle, the 10m is as skinny as the club bank balance and players are held down in the tackle far too long.
On this evidence, new British director of refereeing, Australian Greg McCallum, clearly has plenty of work to do.
Again by NSW rugby league standards, skill levels are low. Queensland-born No 7 Glen Tomlinson does some intelligent prompting, but balls are regularly spilled, tries bombed and kicks misdirected, though poor tackling does permit several pulsating passages of play, resulting in three tries in all.
(Relatively speaking, that's entertainment. Elsewhere in Yorkshire, Hull Kingston Rovers are being beaten by Barrow by a late drop goal, 1-0 |)
Perhaps, as a sodden Garry Jack suggested one night after training at Salford's Willows ground, as the rain slanted in like stair-rods off the Pennines, poor climate - maybe even poor diet, too - are factors in the continuing inability of the British to match the Australians, especially on fitness.
Perhaps, too, this inability is the inevitable product of an under-funded football code that remains, despite enterprises such as the London Broncos, highly concentrated along the M62 corridor between Lancashire and Yorkshire. And even there, it is severely squeezed in the competition for sponsors and spectators by much stronger soccer clubs, any one of whose star striker probably earns more in a week than the Batley 13 is paid in a month of muddy Sundays.
BUT much of the blame must be laid at the doorstep of the British rugby league HQ in the unsalubrious Chapeltown Road, Leeds, for allowing the present configuration of clubs and overcrowding of programs to continue.
As the administration has recently rediscovered with its Framing the Future blueprint, that is easier announced that achieved. Painful though it may be, most experts agree that - as in Australia - some clubs must close, others must merge and the disparity between the haves of Central Park and have-nots of pretty-well every other park must be reduced.
Though Wigan have by their consistent excellence probably done more than any other agency to raise the standard and profile of the "third force" winter football code in Britain, their continued domination must disturb administrators, who are increasingly beginning to talk of salary caps.
Here, far more than in Australia, success has become selfperpetuating, as Wigan capture silverware, sponsors, spectators and star players, be they established internationals such as former All Black Va'aiga Tuigamala, or promising newcomers such as Terry O'Connor and Barrie McDermott, snatched from Salford and Oldham, respectively.
Though history hangs heavy on the game as it approaches its 100th anniversary, a super league must be built, based not on current league position but financial power and potential. So far, though, little progress has been made.
It is not altogether surprising. Parochialism may be blamed for producing a system that is inflexible and insular, setting greater store by beating local rivals (in Batley's case, Dewsbury) than being part of a viable structure capable of producing a side that is internationally competitive.
But it remains the strength and weakness, the delight and the despair, of British rugby league.
INEVITABLY, it is the small clubs which are accused of being obstructive.
"Cloth cap brigade stifles league's progress," read one typical newspaper headline after Framing the Future was effectively shelved.
That cannot fairly be said of Batley, an honest, hospitable and passionately proud community-based club whose fortunes have ebbed and less frequently flowed with those of the local woollen textiles industry.
Once the Batley area boasted more than 250 working mills, but most have either closed, been demolished or converted to warehouse as local unemployment soared to 28 per cent.
Now, thanks partly to central government investment, the community is fighting back with new enterprises opening and new jobs being created.
The Gallant Youths, whose last "honours" were as runners-up in the Yorkshire Cup in 1953, are part of that fight. This weekend, work begins on the new Challenge family stand, part of a Pound 3 million (about $7 million)redevelopment program. Additional facilities, including an all-weather pitch, are planned.
And after the 10-6 win over Swinton, the team is in second place on the ladder (now sadly it has just had its coach stolen by Yorkshire rivals Featherstone Rovers).
Says chairman Ball boldly: "We are financially viable, we are investing in new facilities and we aim to go up to the first division or premier division or whatever it is called as champions."
It would be a cruel reorganisation which denied clubs like Batley that chance.
And it would be a shortsighted administrator who did not recognise that for many British rugby league fans that may be as important as beating Australia today.
© 1994 Sydney Morning Herald