Just recently I discovered that one of our ESPN channels
shows Rugby League club-matches from Australia and England. It’s the end of a
long drought for me, and I’ve been watching avidly ever since.
There was no football of any kind in our sheep-raising
district when I was a boy. My boarding-school in Brisbane made us play Rugby Union
every Saturday – rain, hail or shine! Kids of my size traditionally played
either half-back or hooker. Yes, I was a teenage hooker – the poor bugger in
the middle of every scrum.
But League was our game of choice in pick-up
games. The rules were simpler, and anyway League was far more popular with the
public in Queensland. And in NSW. In all the other States, Aussie Rules was the
football game – a variant of Gaelic Football.
It was my Dad’s boast that he had been present the day the
Toowoomba League team beat the England touring team in the 1920s. 30,000 people
were in the ground, he said. That equalled the town’s entire population, but many
of the watchers had come in from the hinterland. A very exciting game, he
assured me, although the crowd was packed together too closely to let him see
much. No CCTV, then. "Nigger" Brown (I blogged about him and his nickname in May 2013) wasn’t
playing; he’d retired by then. Dad would have given his right arm to see him
play.
And, speaking of right arms… My proud boast is that I was present at the second
Test Match in 1958 (“the Battle of Brisbane”), when Great Britain beat
Australia. The GB captain broke his forearm three minutes after the start, and for
the rest of the game he played his arm hanging loose from the shoulder – packing
down in the scrums, tackling and passing as best he could. No substitutes
allowed in those days.
Four other British players were badly damaged during the
game; only the one with the broken collar-bone went off. I don’t remember much
about the game, but the captain’s absurd bravery is a very vivid memory for me.
Rugby League has always been passionately supported in its
home regions – basically, the north of England and the east of Australia. Rugby
Union was a posh-Public-Schools game, and an amateur sport for most of its life;
League was a working-man’s game.
In recent years it has become a very “matey” sport,
especially in Australia. Referees’ words are broadcast to the crowd, full of
friendly advice. “Hold on, Billy: he wasn’t ready. Start that again!” “Stay
behind the line, you fellows.” “Give it a rest, Jamie. I don’t want to talk
about it.” To the captains: “Come over here, Michael. Josh, you too. Listen,
tell your guys – Hey, Michael! Get back here. I haven’t finished yet…!”
Trainers run onto the field at any old time and squirt water
onto sweaty faces. The other night I saw both trainers nursing an
injured player on the ground, not waiting for the ref to stop the game.
Everybody’s supposed to be concerned about concussion, but if a player gets
knocked about, they wait for him to find his wits again and make him walk off
the field with them. Only wusses get carried off. The spirit of the
England captain lives on!
The rules have changed quite a bit since the ‘60s: some for
the better, some not. The old-style scrums have been abandoned in the interests
of making the game faster. Tackles are limited to sets of six, where they used
to have no limit at all. Illegal passes are given the benefit of the doubt more
often than they used to be. Players have to be doing serious mischief to be
pulled up for offside; three or four tackles can occur before everybody is back
behind the ball. As long as they're not interfering with play – no worries, mate!
In my day, Toowoomba teams used to play what was called
“contact” rugby, which called for players to pass the ball pretty much as soon
as they were touched. Gosh, did that make for a fast game! Naturally, it only
worked with players who were light and fast, which our boys were.
Frank Drake (our magical fullback) once caught a kick behind
his goalposts and ran into the back line with it. He stayed with them, handled
it three more times (or maybe four; it all happened quite a distance away) as
it passed up and down from one side of the field to the other and back again, and again, and scored at the other end. That’s been as memorable for me as the
man with the broken arm, in its way.
