Recently I started playing rugby union. I should stress, I have played the game before, at school plus a few games afterwards, when I was in further and higher 'education'. But it has been a long time since I picked up a rugby ball in anger.
I chose rugby union by the way, because, despite being a rugby league man to my core, playing league at the age of 38 is simply beyond me. The aerobic and anaerobic demands of the game are just too much. Being balding, overweight and having a bad knee does not preclude anyone from playing union, as I have discovered. The two occasions I've had pneumonia in the last 15 years don't seem to matter too much anyway. Nor the decade and a half spent indulging an obsessive passion for booze.This is a good thing, and shows that participating in sport is not actually as hard as it might appear.
It's worth writing about from a number of perspectives. Firstly, beginning a contact sport at my age is an interesting experience in itself. And the contact is not tickling and cuddling, despite what many 4th team games might look like to the uninitiated. My first game, an hour on the wing, saw me covered in bruises, from my shins to my shoulders. Soccer this wasn't.
Being Fit Enough
Of course, I have a reasonable amount of athletic ability to get me through, I have spent a lot of time playing soccer after all in the last two decades since I last played rugby seriously. I have run a reasonable amount and kept myself in reasonable shape, certainly after I stopped drinking some seven years ago. But thinking that you're fit is not the same as being fit, and being fit is not the same as being fit enough.
The training I've done with the club has been more interesting and more challenging than anything I've done physically in a while, and that includes running a half marathon. Originally, I just signed up to play touch rugby, but was talked into playing proper games too. The challenge of getting fit enough to cope with a game every week has been hard, but it gives some focus to my training and is something to strive for. The knocks and the bruises make it even harder, especially when my body is crying out for a rest. Taking a few days off from physical activity here and there has become crucial.
But my own personal physical battles are not necessarily the most interesting thing, important as they are to me. As a writer and journalist, the experience is also an interesting exercise in perspective. To be a participant, rather than an observer, is something which has not always been part of my life in recent years, as I've been paid to watch others doing things.
It may sound simplistic, but my empathy for professional sports people has increased massively. Not with the softies of professional football, for whom my respect has actually declined even further, but for people in contact sports, and sports which demand extreme fitness, it has increased massively. The endurance component in rugby is also huge; this is not a sport which is all about power and strength.
Heroes of Rugby
My heroes, in the sport of rugby league, produce some amazing feats of skill and strength each week. Playing rugby union has allowed me to see just how amazing some of these feats are. The pressure that a player comes under, in terms of fitness, aggression from the opposition and having limited time to make decisions and act, is something which I have really come to appreciate anew. Yelling at players from the terraces becomes a different experience, with me understanding once again just how difficult it is to give of your best all the time under extreme pressure.
As a novelist, rather than a journalist, the experience has also been interesting.I write a lot about group dynamics, about how people, especially men, act when they are together. In the past, my focus has been largely on how people work together and act in the workplace. Which is an environment which tends to make people into arseholes. If you want to see the very worst of people, go to work with them. That was one of the main themes of 'Stumbles and Half Slips'.
I have written a lot about people at play in the pub too, in 'Lescar', but again, if you want to see the very worst of someone, go and get pissed with them in a shithole pub. Negatives abound, so what has been interesting to me is how different a story it is when playing rugby.
I didn't know anyone at the club, Hallamshire RUFC, before I started going training with them, yet I've been welcomed without any reservations. This was something new for me, I'm used to having to make my way into groups of people on a wave of destructive negativity, a big gob and a sharp wit coming in handy.
This was different though. The whole thing was about encouraging people to do their best. There is also plenty of violence in rugby, league and union, so knowing that people are behind you is very encouraging. The extreme nature of the sport seems to bring the best out of people, in terms of heart, bravery, camaraderie and willingness to sacrifice self for team almost every time. Team talks have spoken of 'no blame, no whinging'. This is very different to football, a sport where blaming other people
for what happens is as much a part of the game as passing the ball.
Grist to Society's Mill
This is all grist to the mill as a writer. In my current fictional projects I'm sketching out ideas for a western and a novel based on the differences between the rugby codes, probably set in England just before World War Two. Playing rugby again has not only provided great insight in terms of how people behave in a 'battle' situation, but also re-connected my senses to the physical. The smell of mud, how the grass feels when you fall over, the strangely evocative sound of a shoulder connecting with someone's face, pain, surprise, sudden fear overcome by action, the sting of a blow to the shin, the instant defeats and tiny victories which occur in their hundreds throughout a game, and the sense of all pulling together for an intangible sort of success.
The game also places you in a ready-made community, where what we have in common with each other is more important than our differences. Class differences, as everywhere in England, are easily perceived, if you want to look for them, but they actually do not matter in this environment, certainly not on the pitch. Beyond disparaging and humorous references to countries like Australia and South Africa, where some of our players come from, nationality, race and religion are rarely, if ever, mentioned. Helping hands are frequently offered, whether for the benefit of the club or for each other. It looks very much like the kind of society I'd like to live in, to be honest.
If that sounds profound, it's meant to. As we live in an increasingly atomised society, with the communal ethic continually being eroded by those who prefer profit to people, it's something to seriously consider.
Zack Wilson is the author of 'Stumbles and Half Slips' from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
Showing posts with label rugby league. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rugby league. Show all posts
Monday, 25 March 2013
Monday, 19 November 2012
Steve Ely: Poet of Sunday Leagues and Sainted Rebellion
Steve Ely is a poet and author from Yorkshire, England. When I first came across his work, thanks to social media, it struck as very different indeed from much of the poetry that was being written. Consciously intellectual, with historical subject matter and archaic language, it celebrated an England of northern saints and doomed peasant rebellions.
It also challenged the reader to understand the references. It was poetry to be read, rather than consumed in seconds and forgotten. The work had gravity.
From my point of view, Steve's viewpoints on history and culture seemed to resonate with some of my own. When I first read Steve's work, I had just read the late Mick Imlah's 'The Lost Leader'. Imlah's book, with its reference to Bonnie Prince Charlie in its title, was a poetic treatment of Scotland's history. Often obscure in its references, it used poetry to both inform and make wider historical and contemporary points. It used the past to illuminate the present.
Steve's work seemed similar to me, certainly in some of its textures and fundamentals, its stating points and attitudes. He writes about football players as well as monks, Falklands War heroes as well as medieval saints.
This is ambitious poetry, stimulating work which goes far beyond the merely observational or solipsistic. I spoke to Steve about his writing, his sporting passions and what drives him to express himslef in the way he does. Of particular interest to me were his references to sport in literature, and how playing and watching sport had contributed to his work.
Firstly, your writing seems to indicate an intriguing and, to many people, probably baffling mix of the archaic and the radical. You use Catholic faith, Anglo Saxon language and archaic forms in your writing, as examples, but you are also a socialist and a self-professed hater of Tories, as well as liberals. How do you reconcile what seem to be such competing instincts? Is it hard work to make a coherent whole out of such varied and seemingly competing instincts?
In a word, yes! I’m a former socialist – I was in and around the left for large parts of the early eighties and early nineties (with an interlude in the Green Party) and I retain some of the atavisms of the left, such as a knee jerk animus to Conservatism.
But I haven’t been a member of a political party since 1996 and my political activism since then has been non-existent. However, since my second, unpublished, book of poems, JerUSAlem, which was an exploration of American extremism and concepts of the American Dream, pretty much everything I’ve written has had a political edge.
Over the last four years I’ve been exploring the roots of England in my work and my embracing of Catholicism is part of that.
But I’m a poet, not a politician, and although you’re right to suggest I’m working to a synthesis of sorts, I’m not looking to reach a manifesto position – I don’t see that as being my job. I want to raise important themes through my work and challenge my audience. But most of all I want to create striking and evocative work with a powerful affect.
You have written about war as well as sport. What do you make of Orwell's 'war without the shooting' reference to sport?
I think Orwell’s statement is often understood in the simplistic sense of, ‘young men used to go to war and sow their wild oats of allegiance and violence but now there aren’t as many opportunities to fight in wars, so playing and supporting sport is a surrogate outlet for the same emotions’.
It’s an interesting perspective, with some truth in it, but ultimately obfuscatory. If you’re part of a team – as player or supporter – you inevitably get that electric sense of belonging, mutual responsibility, support and communal striving in which your individual identity is harnessed in, and to some extent subsumed, in a greater whole.
Given that sport, by definition, involves asserting yourself against an opponent in a context of physical exertion and high emotion (competition), violence and aggression will never be far beneath the surface. When overlaid by aggravating factors of politics, religion or long standing rivalry (Celtic-Rangers, Fenerbache/Galatasary), for example, it can be seen as analogous to war. But I wouldn’t push it beyond an analogue. Sport isn't war.
So, if sport cannot be called 'war', can it be called 'art' with any justification?
At its best, sport is an art form, or a thing of beauty at any rate. The movement and grace of Barca in the 2010-11 season, the vision, technical accomplishment and audacity of Ibrahimovic’s last goal against England the other night, Bergkamp’s goals against Argentina, Leicester & Newcastle, Carlos Alberto’s winner in the 1970 world cup final – these things take the breath away – like Lawrence says about the ‘shout’ of the tortoise - ‘it sounds on the plasm direct’ - not just an aesthetic, physical or intellectual impact – the moment impacts whole body.
What do you think watching sport offers writers in the way of inspiration or understanding?
Having played team sport all my life, the thing sport has brought me is an appreciation of the importance of what might simplistically be called team spirit – that the individual is always part of a larger collective and has a responsibility to fulfil a role in that collective that is reciprocated in the care and support the individual receives from the team.
Or, as we used to say when I played for the Travellers FC - ‘one in - all in’. That’s what Camus meant when he said, "all that I know of morality and obligations I owe to football." Bill Shankly and Brian Clough called it socialism. It’s certainly Catholic Social Teaching in a brightly coloured shirt.
The other week saw a great clash in Glasgow between Celtic and Barcelona. Both those teams have strong religious/ethnic/nationalistic identities, albeit in Celtic's case that of a non-native tradition. Do you think that attaching such strong cultural significance to sports teams is healthy?
The fervour generated in the Old Firm matches can provide legitimisation for psychopaths – there was a horrible incident a few years ago when a Rangers ‘fan’ slit the throat of a Celtic fan outside Ibrox in an unprovoked attack, purely because the latter was wearing the hooped shirt.
That was exceptional, but there’s no doubt that this ‘sectarianism’ gets more or less routinely out of hand. But, for better or worse, Rangers and Celtic have become emblematic of the identities of many of their supporters, and the affective power arising from that, alongside the context of wider politico-religious conflict, is what makes the Old Firm.
You regret the excesses, but ultimately, would you have it any other way?
Barca is different. For the almost forty years of Franco's dictatorship, Barca was the only expression of Catalan identity and nationalism the Catalans could get away with, and it is why Barca is ‘mes plus un club’.
Take that away, and all you’ve got is Man City, or Chelsea. You can’t separate politics and sport, because sport is not just about entertainment – it’s about allegiance, activism, commitment, engagement and identity. So often, sporting teams emerge from very specific communities and are the flagship of those communities.
Every time Nottingham Forest play at Oakwell, chants of ‘scab’ echo around the ground – and the thing is, they used to before the 1984-5 strike – the folk memory of the terraces was remembering the aftermath of the 1926 strike, when the Spencer’s bosses union split Cook’s NUM.
‘Politics’ in sport ramps up the intensity and makes for a more electrifying experience – but you’ve got to rein in the nutters.
What sports do you like? Who are your sporting heroes and why?
Football is my main sport. I played to a decent standard Sundays (and sometimes Saturdays as well) for over twenty years.
I was a striker. I began as a Stan Bowles-type dribbling inside left, evolved into a Steve Claridge type workhorse and ended my career as a Grant Holt style lump.
As a kid I supported Sheffield United and saw them play River Plate in 1978 just after Argentina had won the World Cup. United had just bought Alex Sabella (now the coach of the Argentinian national team) from River and the pre-season friendly was part of the deal.
Leopoldo Luque, Daniel Passerella and Ubaldo Filliol of the cup winning team played. United won three-two, with Alan Woodward scoring the winner from the spot.
Aged about sixteen, I switched teams and started watching Barnsley with my mates, largely because I was sick of going to Bramall Lane on my own – nobody else I knew supported United. I had a season ticket at Oakwell for six or seven years but I haven’t been for ages now.
I never really felt an emotional connect with Barnsley, because I was a latecomer to them, I suppose.
I also watch a lot of Rugby League on Sky. I used to play league as a young kid.
At middle school we had a teacher, Mr Milnes, who was from Featherstone, and he introduced the game to the school. We were very good at that age – we used to beat sides from Cas and Fev, who were not hapy that a team from outside the league heartlands was besting them.
I love the mercurial geniuses: Maradona, the greatest of all time, Messi, who will supercede him, Best, Gascoigne, Rivaldo and Dennis Bergkamp, for his purity.
From League I like Rob Burrow and Sam Tomkins, for the same reasons.
Your own English nationalism is very different from that of groups like the EDL. You also have an Irish connection. What made you think of yourself as English? Is being from Yorkshire more important that being English to you?
My concept of England is based on the concept of the people in the land and the corollary opinion that, over centuries, the people have been expropriated and the land degraded and destroyed.
I suppose I’m a utopian in the tradition of William Morris - my project is heuristic and archaeological, seeking to bring to light neglected aspects of Englishness – the Anglo-Danish heritage, the pre-reformation English Catholic Church, the traditions of resistance running through the silvaticii rebels against the Norman occupation, the Peasant’s Revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace, the radicalism of the English revolution, the nineteenth and twentienth century working class movements and the particular experience of ‘the North’, as well as the wider heritage.
From these, to use Eliot’s idiom, I assemble the fragments ‘I shore against my ruins’.
It is a tragedy that discourse of Englishness, or of English nationalism, is pre-sullied by the reactionary racist populism of the EDL or the fascist successors of Moseley’s BUF from the NF to the BNP.
It’s up to the rest of us to wrest the discourse of identity and nationality away from those motivated by confusion, fear and hatred. And a precondition for this is engagement with the past to re-discover the wellsprings.
For all our alleged national obsession with ‘heritage’, (the ‘mad parade’ of the Sex Pistol’s in God Save the Queen), there is probably no developed country in the world in which the person on the street is more ignorant of even the basics of the history of the nation to which they belong, not to mention their local history. There has certainly been no European nation quicker to throw it away.
Yorkshire is important to me as county and regional identity should be to everyone - but ultimately, county identity should find its place in that wider polity of the nation.
I’m also, for better or worse (sometimes better, often worse), very class conscious, almost instinctively so. At the core of my developing, incoherent worldview is what might be called transcendental parochialism.
I vision a time when people can name the birds and animals in the farmland near their town, know the significance of the funny old building on the corner and the gnarly old tree in the town square, understand why the river running through their village is straight and not meandering, know who the guy on the statue was, why they’re living in a tower block, their local and national history (etc) – as well being engaged in current affairs and global issues.
I suppose I’m tacitly proposing a kind of informed civic engagement in which people secure in their identity and interests and with a sense of solidarity with their corporate community, are empowered to assert their interests and shape their world.
In my recent work, I use archaic forms – Old and Middle English, quotations, epigraphs and references from/to ancient and neglected texts, the spellings and syntax of the Wyclif and King James Bibles, for example – to emphasise my vision of the essential continuity of England and the English.
Historical and literary studies impose a series of arbitrary disjunctions – Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Mediaeval, etc.
This has the effect of severing ‘the past’ from the present, resulting in its neglect. The very term ‘History’ in the popular conception implies something definitively past, therefore irrelevant and thus something that can with good conscience be ignored. My forthcoming book Oswald’s Book of Hours (February 2013 – available for pre-order on Amazon!) and my work in progress, Englaland, are synchronic and synoptic looks at England. The tributaries flow into a single stream.
Lastly, would you have preferred to write a bestselling book or to be a sports star yourself?
Well past the time when it was a clearly a pipe-dream, I clung to the forlorn hope that I could ‘make it’ as a professional footballer, go on to play for England, score in a Cup Final and so on.
It was never my ambition to write a bestselling book, as such, because that seems to imply a certain pandering to the audience which inevitably compromises artistic vision.
I write what I have to, what I’m driven to and if anyone else likes it, that’s a bonus. So professional footballer it is. I could’ve written in the afternoons when the rest of the lads were playing snooker.
Steve's novel 'Ratmen' is available from Blackheath Books.
It also challenged the reader to understand the references. It was poetry to be read, rather than consumed in seconds and forgotten. The work had gravity.
From my point of view, Steve's viewpoints on history and culture seemed to resonate with some of my own. When I first read Steve's work, I had just read the late Mick Imlah's 'The Lost Leader'. Imlah's book, with its reference to Bonnie Prince Charlie in its title, was a poetic treatment of Scotland's history. Often obscure in its references, it used poetry to both inform and make wider historical and contemporary points. It used the past to illuminate the present.
Steve's work seemed similar to me, certainly in some of its textures and fundamentals, its stating points and attitudes. He writes about football players as well as monks, Falklands War heroes as well as medieval saints.
This is ambitious poetry, stimulating work which goes far beyond the merely observational or solipsistic. I spoke to Steve about his writing, his sporting passions and what drives him to express himslef in the way he does. Of particular interest to me were his references to sport in literature, and how playing and watching sport had contributed to his work.
Firstly, your writing seems to indicate an intriguing and, to many people, probably baffling mix of the archaic and the radical. You use Catholic faith, Anglo Saxon language and archaic forms in your writing, as examples, but you are also a socialist and a self-professed hater of Tories, as well as liberals. How do you reconcile what seem to be such competing instincts? Is it hard work to make a coherent whole out of such varied and seemingly competing instincts?
In a word, yes! I’m a former socialist – I was in and around the left for large parts of the early eighties and early nineties (with an interlude in the Green Party) and I retain some of the atavisms of the left, such as a knee jerk animus to Conservatism.
But I haven’t been a member of a political party since 1996 and my political activism since then has been non-existent. However, since my second, unpublished, book of poems, JerUSAlem, which was an exploration of American extremism and concepts of the American Dream, pretty much everything I’ve written has had a political edge.
Over the last four years I’ve been exploring the roots of England in my work and my embracing of Catholicism is part of that.
But I’m a poet, not a politician, and although you’re right to suggest I’m working to a synthesis of sorts, I’m not looking to reach a manifesto position – I don’t see that as being my job. I want to raise important themes through my work and challenge my audience. But most of all I want to create striking and evocative work with a powerful affect.
You have written about war as well as sport. What do you make of Orwell's 'war without the shooting' reference to sport?
I think Orwell’s statement is often understood in the simplistic sense of, ‘young men used to go to war and sow their wild oats of allegiance and violence but now there aren’t as many opportunities to fight in wars, so playing and supporting sport is a surrogate outlet for the same emotions’.
It’s an interesting perspective, with some truth in it, but ultimately obfuscatory. If you’re part of a team – as player or supporter – you inevitably get that electric sense of belonging, mutual responsibility, support and communal striving in which your individual identity is harnessed in, and to some extent subsumed, in a greater whole.
Given that sport, by definition, involves asserting yourself against an opponent in a context of physical exertion and high emotion (competition), violence and aggression will never be far beneath the surface. When overlaid by aggravating factors of politics, religion or long standing rivalry (Celtic-Rangers, Fenerbache/Galatasary), for example, it can be seen as analogous to war. But I wouldn’t push it beyond an analogue. Sport isn't war.
So, if sport cannot be called 'war', can it be called 'art' with any justification?
At its best, sport is an art form, or a thing of beauty at any rate. The movement and grace of Barca in the 2010-11 season, the vision, technical accomplishment and audacity of Ibrahimovic’s last goal against England the other night, Bergkamp’s goals against Argentina, Leicester & Newcastle, Carlos Alberto’s winner in the 1970 world cup final – these things take the breath away – like Lawrence says about the ‘shout’ of the tortoise - ‘it sounds on the plasm direct’ - not just an aesthetic, physical or intellectual impact – the moment impacts whole body.
What do you think watching sport offers writers in the way of inspiration or understanding?
Having played team sport all my life, the thing sport has brought me is an appreciation of the importance of what might simplistically be called team spirit – that the individual is always part of a larger collective and has a responsibility to fulfil a role in that collective that is reciprocated in the care and support the individual receives from the team.
Or, as we used to say when I played for the Travellers FC - ‘one in - all in’. That’s what Camus meant when he said, "all that I know of morality and obligations I owe to football." Bill Shankly and Brian Clough called it socialism. It’s certainly Catholic Social Teaching in a brightly coloured shirt.
The other week saw a great clash in Glasgow between Celtic and Barcelona. Both those teams have strong religious/ethnic/nationalistic identities, albeit in Celtic's case that of a non-native tradition. Do you think that attaching such strong cultural significance to sports teams is healthy?
The fervour generated in the Old Firm matches can provide legitimisation for psychopaths – there was a horrible incident a few years ago when a Rangers ‘fan’ slit the throat of a Celtic fan outside Ibrox in an unprovoked attack, purely because the latter was wearing the hooped shirt.
That was exceptional, but there’s no doubt that this ‘sectarianism’ gets more or less routinely out of hand. But, for better or worse, Rangers and Celtic have become emblematic of the identities of many of their supporters, and the affective power arising from that, alongside the context of wider politico-religious conflict, is what makes the Old Firm.
You regret the excesses, but ultimately, would you have it any other way?
Barca is different. For the almost forty years of Franco's dictatorship, Barca was the only expression of Catalan identity and nationalism the Catalans could get away with, and it is why Barca is ‘mes plus un club’.
Take that away, and all you’ve got is Man City, or Chelsea. You can’t separate politics and sport, because sport is not just about entertainment – it’s about allegiance, activism, commitment, engagement and identity. So often, sporting teams emerge from very specific communities and are the flagship of those communities.
Every time Nottingham Forest play at Oakwell, chants of ‘scab’ echo around the ground – and the thing is, they used to before the 1984-5 strike – the folk memory of the terraces was remembering the aftermath of the 1926 strike, when the Spencer’s bosses union split Cook’s NUM.
‘Politics’ in sport ramps up the intensity and makes for a more electrifying experience – but you’ve got to rein in the nutters.
What sports do you like? Who are your sporting heroes and why?
Football is my main sport. I played to a decent standard Sundays (and sometimes Saturdays as well) for over twenty years.
I was a striker. I began as a Stan Bowles-type dribbling inside left, evolved into a Steve Claridge type workhorse and ended my career as a Grant Holt style lump.
As a kid I supported Sheffield United and saw them play River Plate in 1978 just after Argentina had won the World Cup. United had just bought Alex Sabella (now the coach of the Argentinian national team) from River and the pre-season friendly was part of the deal.
Leopoldo Luque, Daniel Passerella and Ubaldo Filliol of the cup winning team played. United won three-two, with Alan Woodward scoring the winner from the spot.
Aged about sixteen, I switched teams and started watching Barnsley with my mates, largely because I was sick of going to Bramall Lane on my own – nobody else I knew supported United. I had a season ticket at Oakwell for six or seven years but I haven’t been for ages now.
I never really felt an emotional connect with Barnsley, because I was a latecomer to them, I suppose.
I also watch a lot of Rugby League on Sky. I used to play league as a young kid.
At middle school we had a teacher, Mr Milnes, who was from Featherstone, and he introduced the game to the school. We were very good at that age – we used to beat sides from Cas and Fev, who were not hapy that a team from outside the league heartlands was besting them.
I love the mercurial geniuses: Maradona, the greatest of all time, Messi, who will supercede him, Best, Gascoigne, Rivaldo and Dennis Bergkamp, for his purity.
From League I like Rob Burrow and Sam Tomkins, for the same reasons.
Your own English nationalism is very different from that of groups like the EDL. You also have an Irish connection. What made you think of yourself as English? Is being from Yorkshire more important that being English to you?
My concept of England is based on the concept of the people in the land and the corollary opinion that, over centuries, the people have been expropriated and the land degraded and destroyed.
I suppose I’m a utopian in the tradition of William Morris - my project is heuristic and archaeological, seeking to bring to light neglected aspects of Englishness – the Anglo-Danish heritage, the pre-reformation English Catholic Church, the traditions of resistance running through the silvaticii rebels against the Norman occupation, the Peasant’s Revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace, the radicalism of the English revolution, the nineteenth and twentienth century working class movements and the particular experience of ‘the North’, as well as the wider heritage.
From these, to use Eliot’s idiom, I assemble the fragments ‘I shore against my ruins’.
It is a tragedy that discourse of Englishness, or of English nationalism, is pre-sullied by the reactionary racist populism of the EDL or the fascist successors of Moseley’s BUF from the NF to the BNP.
It’s up to the rest of us to wrest the discourse of identity and nationality away from those motivated by confusion, fear and hatred. And a precondition for this is engagement with the past to re-discover the wellsprings.
For all our alleged national obsession with ‘heritage’, (the ‘mad parade’ of the Sex Pistol’s in God Save the Queen), there is probably no developed country in the world in which the person on the street is more ignorant of even the basics of the history of the nation to which they belong, not to mention their local history. There has certainly been no European nation quicker to throw it away.
Yorkshire is important to me as county and regional identity should be to everyone - but ultimately, county identity should find its place in that wider polity of the nation.
I’m also, for better or worse (sometimes better, often worse), very class conscious, almost instinctively so. At the core of my developing, incoherent worldview is what might be called transcendental parochialism.
I vision a time when people can name the birds and animals in the farmland near their town, know the significance of the funny old building on the corner and the gnarly old tree in the town square, understand why the river running through their village is straight and not meandering, know who the guy on the statue was, why they’re living in a tower block, their local and national history (etc) – as well being engaged in current affairs and global issues.
I suppose I’m tacitly proposing a kind of informed civic engagement in which people secure in their identity and interests and with a sense of solidarity with their corporate community, are empowered to assert their interests and shape their world.
In my recent work, I use archaic forms – Old and Middle English, quotations, epigraphs and references from/to ancient and neglected texts, the spellings and syntax of the Wyclif and King James Bibles, for example – to emphasise my vision of the essential continuity of England and the English.
Historical and literary studies impose a series of arbitrary disjunctions – Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Mediaeval, etc.
This has the effect of severing ‘the past’ from the present, resulting in its neglect. The very term ‘History’ in the popular conception implies something definitively past, therefore irrelevant and thus something that can with good conscience be ignored. My forthcoming book Oswald’s Book of Hours (February 2013 – available for pre-order on Amazon!) and my work in progress, Englaland, are synchronic and synoptic looks at England. The tributaries flow into a single stream.
Lastly, would you have preferred to write a bestselling book or to be a sports star yourself?
Well past the time when it was a clearly a pipe-dream, I clung to the forlorn hope that I could ‘make it’ as a professional footballer, go on to play for England, score in a Cup Final and so on.
It was never my ambition to write a bestselling book, as such, because that seems to imply a certain pandering to the audience which inevitably compromises artistic vision.
I write what I have to, what I’m driven to and if anyone else likes it, that’s a bonus. So professional footballer it is. I could’ve written in the afternoons when the rest of the lads were playing snooker.
Steve's novel 'Ratmen' is available from Blackheath Books.
Steve Ely was talking to Zack Wilson, the author of 'Stumbles and Half Slips' from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
Friday, 26 October 2012
Code13 Archive: Lewis Left a Weak Legacy for Rugby League
Some more from the Code13 archive here. It's fair to say that the Rugby Football League didn't like this article...
Richard Lewis has now been gone from rugby league a while, but it seems fitting as the season nears its end to look at the legacy he left behind, and what that signifies for the sport as a whole.
Commercial
As Bryn Hargreaves confirms he’s leaving Bradford Bulls and the game for a more secure way of making a living, one has to ask fundamental questions about the commercial strength of the sport as Lewis has left it.
We are now in a position where almost every club in the Super League lives, in some way, beyond their means. Club chiefs like Neil Hudgell at Hull Kingston Rovers hint that they are only a whisker away from financial doom. While the RFL seems comfortably solvent, most clubs do not.
Maybe there has been too much focus on moving commercial operations to London and chasing Sport England funding. Whatever the reality, things are not working and we, as a sport, are far too reliant on Sky cash.
What also struck many observers as strange was how in an article celebrating 20 years of Sky coverage, Richard Lewis chose to highlight how supposedly bad the sport was 20 years ago. He used the piece not to celebrate our heritage, but to state that the game 20 years ago was dull and ruined by bad pitches and weather.
It remains unclear just how much rugby league Lewis watched before he took over at the RFL, but he certainly was not describing a game most of us watched and loved, which was thrilling, aggressive and fast long before we played in summer.
To use an opportunity in the national media to blow your own trumpet about how summer rugby had made a poor sport great was an insult of the most unthinking and wooden headed kind.
Little wonder than that a sponsorship deal was negotiated for which no money changed hands. That is surely one of the most damning indictments of a commercial and administrative hierarchy ever in sport.
Internationals
People outside the rugby league heartlands in this country, especially in soccer towns, often believe that there is only one kind of rugby and that is rugby union.
We all agree that internationals are the biggest tool we have in creating genuine expansion, so why has our international game gone massively, massively backwards while union sweeps up in the wider awareness stakes?
Many will indicate the changing of the Great Britain team. Having an England team may have been a decision motivated by enthusing the kind of people who watch the odd game of sport on telly because “England are playing”, but it did nothing for expansion.
When rugby league was riding a wave of general popularity in the late 80s and early 90s, it was in large part due to Welshmen like Jonathan Davies and Scots like Alan Tait playing for Great Britain.
Now Welsh stars can play for a largely part-time Wales team which may have a chance of beating England in a decade or so. No Great Britain tour to inspire passion and aspire to. The situation for players in Ireland is worse, while Scotland seems to have been forgotten about by the game’s hierarchy entirely.
Indeed, there is now a real possibility that should a player from the Celtic countries ever become good enough to play in the NRL (admittedly unlikely as things currently stand), the temptations of qualifying for Australia or New Zealand on residence should not be discounted.
There are no tours either. These were not just exciting international series which grabbed the imagination, but also allowed second string players to develop.
While a full-on tour is probably not practical any more, a test series with a couple of midweek games is. The Tri-Nations was not a bad idea, but the Four Nations has become uninspiring and often insipid, with no momentum building and often precious little passion from the fans for it.
Interestingly, Lewis left the Lawn Tennis Association largely because Great Britain lost their Davies Cup ‘World Status’ and were downgraded to ‘Euro-African Zone’.
The weakness of our international product is not helped by the often obstructionist tactics of the NRL either, but that is another story for another day.
The new era at the RFL must see stronger awareness of the sport’s true heritage, and a more aggressive attitude adopted towards negotiating with the NRL power barons who shape the destiny of the international game.
Expansion
Most rugby league people can agree that expansion as it stands is not going too well. While there have been some significant strides at local levels, at the top level, fewer people than ever outside the heartlands go and watch rugby league.
Undoubtedly, the recession has played a major part in this, but too many expansion projects were built on sand during the Lewis era.
There seemed to be a naive ‘build and they will come’ mentality, which often appears to inform a lot of thinking in this sport.
People may point to Catalans Dragons, but French Catalonia is as much as heartland of rugby league as Cumbria. It was the region which produced the legendary Puig Aubert after all, and he played nearly 60 years ago, so it was hardly virgin territory to begin with.
Wales now has no Super League team at all, which is laughable considering how popular the game continues to be there.
Perhaps the signs were there. It is not, after all, as though tennis, where Richard Lewis cut his administration teeth, has spread much beyond its traditional demographic either. Interestingly, tennis champion Andy Murray thrived outside the traditional system in the UK, something we see some of our talent now doing in the NRL, or rugby union.
There was also a lack of awareness of real success stories like Sheffield due to little sensitivity towards circumstances on the ground. The fact that little attention seemed to be paid to Cumbria also galls.
Grassroots summer rugby seemed to be intended for dual rugby clubs in the south, and has confused and discouraged many clubs in the north. It looked like a managerial, top down decision, which was made with little actual assessment of what it would it do in communities where rugby league is well-established.
The impression of technocrats imposing structures from above may not have been correct, but it was certainly how a lot of people felt.
What is clear as Nigel Wood takes over is that a new era is dawning. Quite what it will bring remains to be seen, but hopefully in cash strapped times we can continue to produce some of the greatest sporting entertainment going on the pitch.
Richard Lewis, though, certainly looked a lot happier dishing out trophies at Wimbledon this summer than he ever did at Old Trafford or Wembley.
Originally published at: http://www.code13rugbyleague.com/2012/09/25/lewis-left-a-weak-legacy-for-rugby-league-fans/
Richard Lewis has now been gone from rugby league a while, but it seems fitting as the season nears its end to look at the legacy he left behind, and what that signifies for the sport as a whole.
Commercial
As Bryn Hargreaves confirms he’s leaving Bradford Bulls and the game for a more secure way of making a living, one has to ask fundamental questions about the commercial strength of the sport as Lewis has left it.
We are now in a position where almost every club in the Super League lives, in some way, beyond their means. Club chiefs like Neil Hudgell at Hull Kingston Rovers hint that they are only a whisker away from financial doom. While the RFL seems comfortably solvent, most clubs do not.
Maybe there has been too much focus on moving commercial operations to London and chasing Sport England funding. Whatever the reality, things are not working and we, as a sport, are far too reliant on Sky cash.
What also struck many observers as strange was how in an article celebrating 20 years of Sky coverage, Richard Lewis chose to highlight how supposedly bad the sport was 20 years ago. He used the piece not to celebrate our heritage, but to state that the game 20 years ago was dull and ruined by bad pitches and weather.
It remains unclear just how much rugby league Lewis watched before he took over at the RFL, but he certainly was not describing a game most of us watched and loved, which was thrilling, aggressive and fast long before we played in summer.
To use an opportunity in the national media to blow your own trumpet about how summer rugby had made a poor sport great was an insult of the most unthinking and wooden headed kind.
Little wonder than that a sponsorship deal was negotiated for which no money changed hands. That is surely one of the most damning indictments of a commercial and administrative hierarchy ever in sport.
Internationals
People outside the rugby league heartlands in this country, especially in soccer towns, often believe that there is only one kind of rugby and that is rugby union.
We all agree that internationals are the biggest tool we have in creating genuine expansion, so why has our international game gone massively, massively backwards while union sweeps up in the wider awareness stakes?
Many will indicate the changing of the Great Britain team. Having an England team may have been a decision motivated by enthusing the kind of people who watch the odd game of sport on telly because “England are playing”, but it did nothing for expansion.
When rugby league was riding a wave of general popularity in the late 80s and early 90s, it was in large part due to Welshmen like Jonathan Davies and Scots like Alan Tait playing for Great Britain.
Now Welsh stars can play for a largely part-time Wales team which may have a chance of beating England in a decade or so. No Great Britain tour to inspire passion and aspire to. The situation for players in Ireland is worse, while Scotland seems to have been forgotten about by the game’s hierarchy entirely.
Indeed, there is now a real possibility that should a player from the Celtic countries ever become good enough to play in the NRL (admittedly unlikely as things currently stand), the temptations of qualifying for Australia or New Zealand on residence should not be discounted.
There are no tours either. These were not just exciting international series which grabbed the imagination, but also allowed second string players to develop.
While a full-on tour is probably not practical any more, a test series with a couple of midweek games is. The Tri-Nations was not a bad idea, but the Four Nations has become uninspiring and often insipid, with no momentum building and often precious little passion from the fans for it.
Interestingly, Lewis left the Lawn Tennis Association largely because Great Britain lost their Davies Cup ‘World Status’ and were downgraded to ‘Euro-African Zone’.
The weakness of our international product is not helped by the often obstructionist tactics of the NRL either, but that is another story for another day.
The new era at the RFL must see stronger awareness of the sport’s true heritage, and a more aggressive attitude adopted towards negotiating with the NRL power barons who shape the destiny of the international game.
Expansion
Most rugby league people can agree that expansion as it stands is not going too well. While there have been some significant strides at local levels, at the top level, fewer people than ever outside the heartlands go and watch rugby league.
Undoubtedly, the recession has played a major part in this, but too many expansion projects were built on sand during the Lewis era.
There seemed to be a naive ‘build and they will come’ mentality, which often appears to inform a lot of thinking in this sport.
People may point to Catalans Dragons, but French Catalonia is as much as heartland of rugby league as Cumbria. It was the region which produced the legendary Puig Aubert after all, and he played nearly 60 years ago, so it was hardly virgin territory to begin with.
Wales now has no Super League team at all, which is laughable considering how popular the game continues to be there.
Perhaps the signs were there. It is not, after all, as though tennis, where Richard Lewis cut his administration teeth, has spread much beyond its traditional demographic either. Interestingly, tennis champion Andy Murray thrived outside the traditional system in the UK, something we see some of our talent now doing in the NRL, or rugby union.
There was also a lack of awareness of real success stories like Sheffield due to little sensitivity towards circumstances on the ground. The fact that little attention seemed to be paid to Cumbria also galls.
Grassroots summer rugby seemed to be intended for dual rugby clubs in the south, and has confused and discouraged many clubs in the north. It looked like a managerial, top down decision, which was made with little actual assessment of what it would it do in communities where rugby league is well-established.
The impression of technocrats imposing structures from above may not have been correct, but it was certainly how a lot of people felt.
What is clear as Nigel Wood takes over is that a new era is dawning. Quite what it will bring remains to be seen, but hopefully in cash strapped times we can continue to produce some of the greatest sporting entertainment going on the pitch.
Richard Lewis, though, certainly looked a lot happier dishing out trophies at Wimbledon this summer than he ever did at Old Trafford or Wembley.
Originally published at: http://www.code13rugbyleague.com/2012/09/25/lewis-left-a-weak-legacy-for-rugby-league-fans/
Zack Wilson is the author of novel 'Stumbles and Half Slips' from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
Thursday, 18 October 2012
RFL insists it's helping Scottish Rugby League: So why the fixture foul-up?
The recent news that the Edinburgh Eagles Rugby League Club would not be entering the 2013 Challenge Cup after all came as something of a blow, I'm sure, to many of us who want to see Scotland develop a competitive rugby league structure North of the Border.
The ridiculous intransigence of the game's governing body is refusing to allow them to re-arrange fixtures so that their Scotland internationals could play for them in the Cup looks vindictively bureaucratic from this distance.
First round fixtures which would normally be held in January are being held at the end of October instead. When the Scotland national team is playing an international against the England Knights.
"We are disappointed to announce that we are unable to enter the Carnegie Challenge Cup 2013," a statement from the Edinburgh Eagles reads.
"The Rugby Football League has changed the normal start date for the preliminary rounds (and) Eagles are currently being represented on the professional international stage by Dave Vernon, Craig Borthwick, Tom Murray and Callum Cockburn.
"The RFL have not allowed any flexibility in the dates for this fixture even though there is a representative match acknowledged by the governing body.
"We are therefore unable to enter the competition with a squad capable of competing.
"We feel that the RFL has let the club down as we look to develop and attract the quality players in the Edinburgh area to play rugby league."
When pressed about the game in Scotland, the RFL will tell you that there are three full-time development officers working there now. Three more than there were in 1995. Well, there's a massive cause for celebration.
Again, it looks like the RFL have not done their research, certainly not about Scotland and how to fire a passion for rugby league there.
No English person will ever understand how much fitba means to Scots. It dominates the national debate and cultural sphere as much as the sporting sphere. It dwarfs other sports in terms of the coverage it receives, even more so than in England. Only someone from maybe Liverpool or the North East of England could possibly understand just how much the game is fixed in Scottish identity.
This means that rugby league is working with a very difficult set of circumstances. Games like shinty probably have a higher profile than rugby league.
Rugby union has some kind of profile, because the Scottish national team, traditionally composed of Borderers and posh boys from Edinburgh private schools, has managed some degree of relative success.
But the current team is stocked with heritage players from England and elsewhere in the world, with few genuinely working-class players pulling on the Dark Blue these days.
Rugby is perceived in Scotland as a middle-class sport, something not really 'for us'.
Good work has been done in the Glasgow area in particular, but the game up in Scotland has to peddle incredibly fast just to stop going backwards.
Anyone who looked at the Scotland squad for the weekend's home defeat by Ireland at Meggetland in Edinburgh will have noticed how many amateur players there were present.
When it comes to Scotland having a competitive team at the 2013 World Cup, it does not look good. The fact that they will play their World Cup games in Cumbria and Salford is also unlikely to fire the imagination of many Scots.
Ireland have a game in Limerick, so why can't Scotland have a game in Scotland. Somewhere like St Mirren Stadium in Paisley would surely be adequate, with good facilities and small stands that will look less empty on television.
There is a serious risk of choking off Scotland's supply of rugby league internationals too. It's an old theme, but the removal of the Great Britain team as the top of the international pyramid was a serious blow to the game in Scotland.
A team consisting of heritage players which is successful can do much to raise the profile of a sport. Just ask Jack Charlton and the Football Association of Ireland.
English-born players from rugby league backgrounds could play for Scotland and help to develop the game, when they knew that they could still turn out for Great Britain.
Now, if you want to have any chance at all of being in a competitive team to play Australia and New Zealand, you have to declare for England.
This process will not be limited to Scots either. Rhys Evans, one of the most promising players to come from Wales in recent years, has already declared for England.
The England coach has also poached players from other countries, like Scotland, making it harder to develop a team for a tournament. Some though, like Dale Ferguson, have returned to the Scottish fold from England, making a mockery of eligibility rules.
Just wait until the day that Scotland produces an NRL level player. He will not be playing for Scotland when the time comes, but opting to play State of Origin or for the Kiwis.
So what can be done?
Restore the Great Britain team for a start. It's part of our game's heritage and should be there as a pinnacle for all British and Irish-born players to aspire to.
Then, you can have a ready-made 'Origin' series with a British championship, in which players play fo birth or heritage countries, keeping the quality level high and helping players to stake a claim for Great Britain places.
This creates a natural pyramid which will help our players better compete with the Southern Hemisphere teams by hardening them up in meaningful international games. It would form a stepping stone to test footy in the same way that State of Origin is meant to.
It also means that Celtic born players can represent their countries and still have a chance to take on the Aussies and Kiwis on a relatively more level playing field. They will then build a bigger personal profile, which can then be used to build a bigger profile for the game as a whole.
The profile of rugby league would also be raised in the Celtic countries by having a competitive British international championship to watch.
And at the end of the season, we could all look forward to a good three-game test series against the Kangaroos or Kiwis, with Wales, Scotland, Ireland and England providing tough midweek opposition for touring teams.
The chances of anything changing soon internationally look low though. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with the way things are currently done amongst fans, there seems no real will to change at the highest level, with the Australian authorities in particular guilty of obstructing much of the progress which could be made with some constructive and less soilpsistic dialogue.
The current international set-up rewards complacency and makes the game look directionless and amateur.
The ridiculous intransigence of the game's governing body is refusing to allow them to re-arrange fixtures so that their Scotland internationals could play for them in the Cup looks vindictively bureaucratic from this distance.
First round fixtures which would normally be held in January are being held at the end of October instead. When the Scotland national team is playing an international against the England Knights.
"We are disappointed to announce that we are unable to enter the Carnegie Challenge Cup 2013," a statement from the Edinburgh Eagles reads.
"The Rugby Football League has changed the normal start date for the preliminary rounds (and) Eagles are currently being represented on the professional international stage by Dave Vernon, Craig Borthwick, Tom Murray and Callum Cockburn.
"The RFL have not allowed any flexibility in the dates for this fixture even though there is a representative match acknowledged by the governing body.
"We are therefore unable to enter the competition with a squad capable of competing.
"We feel that the RFL has let the club down as we look to develop and attract the quality players in the Edinburgh area to play rugby league."
When pressed about the game in Scotland, the RFL will tell you that there are three full-time development officers working there now. Three more than there were in 1995. Well, there's a massive cause for celebration.
Again, it looks like the RFL have not done their research, certainly not about Scotland and how to fire a passion for rugby league there.
No English person will ever understand how much fitba means to Scots. It dominates the national debate and cultural sphere as much as the sporting sphere. It dwarfs other sports in terms of the coverage it receives, even more so than in England. Only someone from maybe Liverpool or the North East of England could possibly understand just how much the game is fixed in Scottish identity.
This means that rugby league is working with a very difficult set of circumstances. Games like shinty probably have a higher profile than rugby league.
Rugby union has some kind of profile, because the Scottish national team, traditionally composed of Borderers and posh boys from Edinburgh private schools, has managed some degree of relative success.
But the current team is stocked with heritage players from England and elsewhere in the world, with few genuinely working-class players pulling on the Dark Blue these days.
Rugby is perceived in Scotland as a middle-class sport, something not really 'for us'.
Good work has been done in the Glasgow area in particular, but the game up in Scotland has to peddle incredibly fast just to stop going backwards.
Anyone who looked at the Scotland squad for the weekend's home defeat by Ireland at Meggetland in Edinburgh will have noticed how many amateur players there were present.
When it comes to Scotland having a competitive team at the 2013 World Cup, it does not look good. The fact that they will play their World Cup games in Cumbria and Salford is also unlikely to fire the imagination of many Scots.
Ireland have a game in Limerick, so why can't Scotland have a game in Scotland. Somewhere like St Mirren Stadium in Paisley would surely be adequate, with good facilities and small stands that will look less empty on television.
There is a serious risk of choking off Scotland's supply of rugby league internationals too. It's an old theme, but the removal of the Great Britain team as the top of the international pyramid was a serious blow to the game in Scotland.
A team consisting of heritage players which is successful can do much to raise the profile of a sport. Just ask Jack Charlton and the Football Association of Ireland.
English-born players from rugby league backgrounds could play for Scotland and help to develop the game, when they knew that they could still turn out for Great Britain.
Now, if you want to have any chance at all of being in a competitive team to play Australia and New Zealand, you have to declare for England.
This process will not be limited to Scots either. Rhys Evans, one of the most promising players to come from Wales in recent years, has already declared for England.
The England coach has also poached players from other countries, like Scotland, making it harder to develop a team for a tournament. Some though, like Dale Ferguson, have returned to the Scottish fold from England, making a mockery of eligibility rules.
Just wait until the day that Scotland produces an NRL level player. He will not be playing for Scotland when the time comes, but opting to play State of Origin or for the Kiwis.
So what can be done?
Restore the Great Britain team for a start. It's part of our game's heritage and should be there as a pinnacle for all British and Irish-born players to aspire to.
Then, you can have a ready-made 'Origin' series with a British championship, in which players play fo birth or heritage countries, keeping the quality level high and helping players to stake a claim for Great Britain places.
This creates a natural pyramid which will help our players better compete with the Southern Hemisphere teams by hardening them up in meaningful international games. It would form a stepping stone to test footy in the same way that State of Origin is meant to.
It also means that Celtic born players can represent their countries and still have a chance to take on the Aussies and Kiwis on a relatively more level playing field. They will then build a bigger personal profile, which can then be used to build a bigger profile for the game as a whole.
The profile of rugby league would also be raised in the Celtic countries by having a competitive British international championship to watch.
And at the end of the season, we could all look forward to a good three-game test series against the Kangaroos or Kiwis, with Wales, Scotland, Ireland and England providing tough midweek opposition for touring teams.
The chances of anything changing soon internationally look low though. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with the way things are currently done amongst fans, there seems no real will to change at the highest level, with the Australian authorities in particular guilty of obstructing much of the progress which could be made with some constructive and less soilpsistic dialogue.
The current international set-up rewards complacency and makes the game look directionless and amateur.
Zack Wilson is the author of novel 'Stumbles and Half Slips' from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
Thursday, 11 October 2012
Rugby League Needs A United Global Family
Sometimes news causes strange reactions in a writer. That was the case today when I read about Scotland international Lee Paterson, who has been plying his trade in France and Australia until fairly recently.
Paterson is a journeyman loose forward or stand-off who has won several caps for Scotland and has been playing at a good standard in France and Australia. Not in the NRL, but at a good level.
Yet he now worries that he might not be able to find a club in the UK due to people having forgotten about him.
"I was full-time at Widnes and when that ended, I got an opportunity to go to France," the 31 year old told the Scotland Rugby League's website.
"I knew I was never going to become rich playing rugby league but I could go and see the world.
"So I went and had two great years with Carpentras and had the chance to move to Limoux. But one of the Australians over there put me in touch with Anthony Seibold, the former London Broncos player, who was at Mackay Cutters in North Queensland.
"They're the feeder team to North Queensland Cowboys in the NRL. I thought this would be my only chance to play in Australia. I really enjoyed it there this year and was offered a deal for 2013 but I decided to come home for family reasons. Now I need a club here.
"I'm worried I might have fallen off the radar, having been away for three years.
"I'm hoping these games against Ireland and England Knights will remind clubs over here what I can do. I'm only 31 so I've got two or three years left in me and I'm confident I can still play at Championship level."
It struck me that an international player like this is an asset to the game, especially when it comes to representing Scotland. Paterson has acquired some rich experience, and clubs outside Super League should all be taking a serious look at him.
Maybe some are, but the point is that he should not have to worry about it.
It strikes me that far too often in our sport we forget about what we should be focusing on and instead fight fires of our own making that burn close to our noses.
The international game is a great example of this. There is massive need in rugby league for an international game which works at the highest level.
There is a great deal of very good work being done to promote the game worldwide, with countries like Serbia, Germany, Lebanon and Sweden all at varying stages of good grassroots development.
They have achieved much of that in spite of little recognition from the international game's true power brokers, the NRL.
The real problem is at the highest level though, where State of Origin has superceded test football as the aim of every player.
The way in which born and bred Kiwis have given up the chance to wear the black of their home country because they want to play State of Origin has become embarrassing.
That is a case for another blog, coming soon, but back to Paterson's case.
It is hard to imagine a player in soccer going away to play abroad for years and being completely forgotten about.
Instead, scouts based in the country where he was playing would be detailed to keep an eye on him, for the sake of his national team as much as anything else.
By the time he returned to his home country, many people involved in the game would have a pretty accurate idea of where he was in playing terms, and what he might be able to do for their club.
In rugby league, it seems that such players simply fall off the radar far too often.
Now, distances are greater in a sport that is played mainly in Northern Europe and Australia, and resources are vastly less than those in football, with nowhere near the kind of global community that the 'Beautiful Game' can claim.
But the game of rugby league is too fractured on a global basis. There seems to be no overall plan when it comes to the international game, and no clarity of common purpose.
Vested interests act to protect privilege and keep their own status intact.
To improve things, and make the international game as successful as it should be, there needs to be a sense of global family, that we all play the same game and want the same things for it.
Too often at the moment, as Paterson's words show, when something leaves our own little box, our own little section of the sport, we forget about it far too easily.
Reform is needed to make rugby league the great international sport it deserves to be. No single body can do it on their own.
Paterson is a journeyman loose forward or stand-off who has won several caps for Scotland and has been playing at a good standard in France and Australia. Not in the NRL, but at a good level.
Yet he now worries that he might not be able to find a club in the UK due to people having forgotten about him.
"I was full-time at Widnes and when that ended, I got an opportunity to go to France," the 31 year old told the Scotland Rugby League's website.
"I knew I was never going to become rich playing rugby league but I could go and see the world.
"So I went and had two great years with Carpentras and had the chance to move to Limoux. But one of the Australians over there put me in touch with Anthony Seibold, the former London Broncos player, who was at Mackay Cutters in North Queensland.
"They're the feeder team to North Queensland Cowboys in the NRL. I thought this would be my only chance to play in Australia. I really enjoyed it there this year and was offered a deal for 2013 but I decided to come home for family reasons. Now I need a club here.
"I'm worried I might have fallen off the radar, having been away for three years.
"I'm hoping these games against Ireland and England Knights will remind clubs over here what I can do. I'm only 31 so I've got two or three years left in me and I'm confident I can still play at Championship level."
It struck me that an international player like this is an asset to the game, especially when it comes to representing Scotland. Paterson has acquired some rich experience, and clubs outside Super League should all be taking a serious look at him.
Maybe some are, but the point is that he should not have to worry about it.
It strikes me that far too often in our sport we forget about what we should be focusing on and instead fight fires of our own making that burn close to our noses.
The international game is a great example of this. There is massive need in rugby league for an international game which works at the highest level.
There is a great deal of very good work being done to promote the game worldwide, with countries like Serbia, Germany, Lebanon and Sweden all at varying stages of good grassroots development.
They have achieved much of that in spite of little recognition from the international game's true power brokers, the NRL.
The real problem is at the highest level though, where State of Origin has superceded test football as the aim of every player.
The way in which born and bred Kiwis have given up the chance to wear the black of their home country because they want to play State of Origin has become embarrassing.
That is a case for another blog, coming soon, but back to Paterson's case.
It is hard to imagine a player in soccer going away to play abroad for years and being completely forgotten about.
Instead, scouts based in the country where he was playing would be detailed to keep an eye on him, for the sake of his national team as much as anything else.
By the time he returned to his home country, many people involved in the game would have a pretty accurate idea of where he was in playing terms, and what he might be able to do for their club.
In rugby league, it seems that such players simply fall off the radar far too often.
Now, distances are greater in a sport that is played mainly in Northern Europe and Australia, and resources are vastly less than those in football, with nowhere near the kind of global community that the 'Beautiful Game' can claim.
But the game of rugby league is too fractured on a global basis. There seems to be no overall plan when it comes to the international game, and no clarity of common purpose.
Vested interests act to protect privilege and keep their own status intact.
To improve things, and make the international game as successful as it should be, there needs to be a sense of global family, that we all play the same game and want the same things for it.
Too often at the moment, as Paterson's words show, when something leaves our own little box, our own little section of the sport, we forget about it far too easily.
Reform is needed to make rugby league the great international sport it deserves to be. No single body can do it on their own.
'Stumbles and Half Slips' by Zack Wilson is available from Amazon.com, published by Epic Rites Press.
Code13 Archive: Mark Aston Part Two
Following on from Tuesday's post, this is the second part of the interview I conducted with Sheffield Eagles coach Mark Aston in the summer of 2011.
In this part, Mark discusses his plans for the Eagles, some of which have undoubtedly come to fruition since then, with the Sheffield club winning the Championship Grand Final in 2012.
The Eagles now share Sheffield United FC’s Bramall Lane Stadium, and Aston is encouraged by what the new venue has done for his team’s prospects, as well as the way his players have responded to this season’s challenges.
How would you assess the state of Sheffield’s season so far, Mark?
I’m reasonably happy. We’ve played nine games and won six of them, so we’ve got a bit of a roll on. We lost our first league game at Bramall Lane to Widnes, but since then we’ve swept everybody before us. So we’re happy there.
When we went to play St Helens I thought we were outstanding – 52-26 and it could have been so much closer. We just made some individual mistakes which cost us. You don’t give interceptions away against teams like that and win games, but it could have been a little bit closer as far as I’m concerned.
The week after though at Leigh we got a lesson in how to play rugby League. They were clinical and we weren’t. We were at sixes and sevens, and the question was ‘Have we fallen in love with ourselves?’ and the answer was ‘yes’, time to get to reality.
It was disappointing though because we had a really good crowd in. We had all the 31 boxes at Bramall Lane sold out that day, we were on Sky and we turned up with a poor performance like that, which we were a bit disappointed with.
So it’s back to basics, back on the field and let’s get physical, as the saying goes.
I know you were pretty disappointed as well about the game at Halifax. What went wrong there?
That was really disappointing. We’d worked hard on defence all week and defensively we were outstanding. But in the second-half our ball control was ridiculous, our completion rate was something like 35 or 37 per cent of our sets. How they didn’t put us to bed I have no idea.
But there was our attitude, our willingness to scramble and put our bodies on the line for each other which was great to see. But we’re disappointed, we scored three tries to two even though we didn’t have a lot of ball. Again, another smack in the chops for us and we needed to bounce back.
The result against Hunslet certainly seemed to show that things had turned round a bit, especially as the Hawks aren’t an easy team to play against, for reasons we won’t discuss here! Were you encouraged by that?
We’ve been pretty physical with the players because I thought they showed a lot of disrespect last week to the backroom staff, to themselves, to each other. They were disrespectful to how we want to play. There were too many individuals coughing up really poor mistakes
So we hammered them again this week and then they came up with a performance like they did against Hunslet, where they beat them 70 odd to 12 and had three other tries disallowed. They were certainly back to the standards I know they’re capable of reaching.
Who’s been playing well at the club?
Misi Taulapapa is getting back to his best, Quentin Laulu-Togagae is fitting in there as well and Menzie Yere’s getting some early ball and causing problems, so we’re encouraged by that.
They’re quality players, but there’s a lot of quality players around them, like Mitchell Stringer. I named Mitch as a prop against Hunslet, he then played in the second-row and I ended up moving him to stand-off. He’s kicked well and he’s put out a ball that any half-back would be proud of to set up Jamie Cording to score by the sticks with not a hand laid on him.
People say he might have a future as a loose forward, but he’s one of the smartest front rowers in the competition. I love smart front-rowers, the days of ‘not so smart’ front rowers have gone.
Andy Henderson is thirty-odd years old but he’s running about like a spring chicken. He’s infectious to have around the place.
What I’ve got here is a real good group of lads who want to play and they want to enjoy it and play with a smile on their face. We’ve had a few hiccups but they’ve bounced back and we’ve got another tough challenge against Dewsbury this week.
We were disappointed where we finished last year in sixth. We want to be as high as we can be up that top six and we want to do better than we did last year, when we got to the semi-final and got beat. So if we can do a little bit better than that we’ll be in the final I’d imagine.
How’s it going off the field as you look to develop the Eagles’ ‘brand’ in a soccer mad city?
The crowd’s are a bit better here at Bramall Lane, and the atmosphere’s better. You can feel a bit more part of it even if you’ve got one or two thousand. the atmosphere’s brilliant. The facility is one of the best rugby facilities in any competition.
It’s a slow burn. It’s a slow process and we’ve always known that. With what’s happening behind the scenes with the scholarships and the academy, all the performance parts are there in place now. What we’ve got to do is drive the attendance up and we’re looking at ways to do that.
I’ve spoken to Hull FC about the re-alignment of their community programmes to try and get more people in. That’ll come. Where we’re at is how do we get that two and a half thousand attendance that you need to get to tick a box for Super League.
All we can is keep knocking away. What I do know is that if we were in Super League we’d get four, five, six thousand at Bramall Lane.
There are people who were Sheffield Eagles fans who now aren’t because of the merger with Huddersfield. I was at a promo we were doing on Fargate in Sheffield city centre not long back. All the boys were there, giving vouchers out and things like that, and there was a man who hasn’t been to see one of our games since we reformed.
This man had never missed a game before the merger. He went to France, he went to Wales, he went absolutely everywhere, home and away, him and his daughter.
I got talking to him and said the merger ripped the heart out of it I asked if he understood the merger, and he said he didn’t really and I don’t think generally people did. This bloke didn’t understand but I explained it to him and he reacted positively.
Has he been back? He said he would, and I would hope he has. We need people like him, as well as the people who live in my village near here and go and watch the Leeds Rhinos now, which is sad. We need those people to get behind us to help us fetch Super League back here.
A lot of people were gutted about what went on in that time period. Can we get back there? Yes, we can. This [Bramall Lane] is the place to do it. There’s lots of exciting things happening. We do what we can on the corporate side of things. Kevin McCabe (Plc chairman of Sheffield United) is very, very supportive of Sheffield Eagles, which is key.
Article originally appeared at:
http://www.code13rugbyleague.com/2011/06/03/exclusive-interview-mark-aston-believes-bramall-lane-is-boosting-sheffield-eagles/
In this part, Mark discusses his plans for the Eagles, some of which have undoubtedly come to fruition since then, with the Sheffield club winning the Championship Grand Final in 2012.
The Eagles now share Sheffield United FC’s Bramall Lane Stadium, and Aston is encouraged by what the new venue has done for his team’s prospects, as well as the way his players have responded to this season’s challenges.
How would you assess the state of Sheffield’s season so far, Mark?
I’m reasonably happy. We’ve played nine games and won six of them, so we’ve got a bit of a roll on. We lost our first league game at Bramall Lane to Widnes, but since then we’ve swept everybody before us. So we’re happy there.
When we went to play St Helens I thought we were outstanding – 52-26 and it could have been so much closer. We just made some individual mistakes which cost us. You don’t give interceptions away against teams like that and win games, but it could have been a little bit closer as far as I’m concerned.
The week after though at Leigh we got a lesson in how to play rugby League. They were clinical and we weren’t. We were at sixes and sevens, and the question was ‘Have we fallen in love with ourselves?’ and the answer was ‘yes’, time to get to reality.
It was disappointing though because we had a really good crowd in. We had all the 31 boxes at Bramall Lane sold out that day, we were on Sky and we turned up with a poor performance like that, which we were a bit disappointed with.
So it’s back to basics, back on the field and let’s get physical, as the saying goes.
I know you were pretty disappointed as well about the game at Halifax. What went wrong there?
That was really disappointing. We’d worked hard on defence all week and defensively we were outstanding. But in the second-half our ball control was ridiculous, our completion rate was something like 35 or 37 per cent of our sets. How they didn’t put us to bed I have no idea.
But there was our attitude, our willingness to scramble and put our bodies on the line for each other which was great to see. But we’re disappointed, we scored three tries to two even though we didn’t have a lot of ball. Again, another smack in the chops for us and we needed to bounce back.
The result against Hunslet certainly seemed to show that things had turned round a bit, especially as the Hawks aren’t an easy team to play against, for reasons we won’t discuss here! Were you encouraged by that?
We’ve been pretty physical with the players because I thought they showed a lot of disrespect last week to the backroom staff, to themselves, to each other. They were disrespectful to how we want to play. There were too many individuals coughing up really poor mistakes
So we hammered them again this week and then they came up with a performance like they did against Hunslet, where they beat them 70 odd to 12 and had three other tries disallowed. They were certainly back to the standards I know they’re capable of reaching.
Who’s been playing well at the club?
Misi Taulapapa is getting back to his best, Quentin Laulu-Togagae is fitting in there as well and Menzie Yere’s getting some early ball and causing problems, so we’re encouraged by that.
They’re quality players, but there’s a lot of quality players around them, like Mitchell Stringer. I named Mitch as a prop against Hunslet, he then played in the second-row and I ended up moving him to stand-off. He’s kicked well and he’s put out a ball that any half-back would be proud of to set up Jamie Cording to score by the sticks with not a hand laid on him.
People say he might have a future as a loose forward, but he’s one of the smartest front rowers in the competition. I love smart front-rowers, the days of ‘not so smart’ front rowers have gone.
Andy Henderson is thirty-odd years old but he’s running about like a spring chicken. He’s infectious to have around the place.
What I’ve got here is a real good group of lads who want to play and they want to enjoy it and play with a smile on their face. We’ve had a few hiccups but they’ve bounced back and we’ve got another tough challenge against Dewsbury this week.
We were disappointed where we finished last year in sixth. We want to be as high as we can be up that top six and we want to do better than we did last year, when we got to the semi-final and got beat. So if we can do a little bit better than that we’ll be in the final I’d imagine.
How’s it going off the field as you look to develop the Eagles’ ‘brand’ in a soccer mad city?
The crowd’s are a bit better here at Bramall Lane, and the atmosphere’s better. You can feel a bit more part of it even if you’ve got one or two thousand. the atmosphere’s brilliant. The facility is one of the best rugby facilities in any competition.
It’s a slow burn. It’s a slow process and we’ve always known that. With what’s happening behind the scenes with the scholarships and the academy, all the performance parts are there in place now. What we’ve got to do is drive the attendance up and we’re looking at ways to do that.
I’ve spoken to Hull FC about the re-alignment of their community programmes to try and get more people in. That’ll come. Where we’re at is how do we get that two and a half thousand attendance that you need to get to tick a box for Super League.
All we can is keep knocking away. What I do know is that if we were in Super League we’d get four, five, six thousand at Bramall Lane.
There are people who were Sheffield Eagles fans who now aren’t because of the merger with Huddersfield. I was at a promo we were doing on Fargate in Sheffield city centre not long back. All the boys were there, giving vouchers out and things like that, and there was a man who hasn’t been to see one of our games since we reformed.
This man had never missed a game before the merger. He went to France, he went to Wales, he went absolutely everywhere, home and away, him and his daughter.
I got talking to him and said the merger ripped the heart out of it I asked if he understood the merger, and he said he didn’t really and I don’t think generally people did. This bloke didn’t understand but I explained it to him and he reacted positively.
Has he been back? He said he would, and I would hope he has. We need people like him, as well as the people who live in my village near here and go and watch the Leeds Rhinos now, which is sad. We need those people to get behind us to help us fetch Super League back here.
A lot of people were gutted about what went on in that time period. Can we get back there? Yes, we can. This [Bramall Lane] is the place to do it. There’s lots of exciting things happening. We do what we can on the corporate side of things. Kevin McCabe (Plc chairman of Sheffield United) is very, very supportive of Sheffield Eagles, which is key.
Article originally appeared at:
http://www.code13rugbyleague.com/2011/06/03/exclusive-interview-mark-aston-believes-bramall-lane-is-boosting-sheffield-eagles/
'Stumbles and Half Slips' by Zack Wilson is available from Amazon.com, published by Epic Rites Press.
Wednesday, 10 October 2012
Code13 Archive: Has the RFL Forgotten Sheffield - Part One
Here is an article which was originally published at Code13rugbyleague.com, which argues the case for more support from the rugby league governing bodies for Sheffield as a city.
In the light of recent comments from Sheffield Eagles director John Whaling, it seems appropriate to re-publish the article here.
If a rugby league club told you that they had the support of the city council and chamber of commerce of the fourth biggest city in England, a place with a large number of well-populated satellite towns, and the backing of the local soccer team who have offered the use of their superb stadium long-term, you would probably think that they were in Super League.
That they have an ex-international player as coach, a charismatic cheerleader for the sport in an area outside of the heartland of the game, would only make them appear more of a top flight outfit. That the city is at the heart of England, a transport hub which connects the east and west coasts and the north to the south east of England, should surely only make it more of a nailed-on top-flight contender. A place where the RFL would surely want to be.
Given the fact that this would also be an ‘expansion’ team, then it might raise even more of an eyebrow of surprise. However, this team is not in Super League, and seems to have been forgotten about when it comes to raising the game’s profile outside of the M62 Corridor. Although it may surprise some people, Sheffield is the city, the Eagles the club.
Sheffield has never been part of rugby league’s heartland. Never. The round ball code has always been king here since the early days of organised ‘football’ in the 19th Century. Two of the world’s oldest football clubs, Hallam FC and Sheffield FC play here, while Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United are two of the game’s most famous names, despite their current lowly league status.
So, although it is in Yorkshire, its sporting culture is significantly different to somewhere like Leeds or Hull. Football, and cricket to some extent, are the chosen pastimes of athletes here, with rugby union well down the list and rugby league rarely mentioned or discussed. This means that, for our sport, it is as much an ‘expansion’ area as North Wales or London.
Yet this seems to have been forgotten by those in the game who crave expansion. Is it because it’s too close to the heartlands, too Northern, too flat cap industrial in the eyes of southerners, to really count as an expansion city?
If so, that is an incredibly short-sighted view. Sheffield has a huge population and huge hinterland and influence which stretches right through vast swathes of the northern and eastern parts of the Midlands. It is a gateway to so many other areas, as well as being in a superb location which enjoys easy transport access however one chooses to travel.
Yet the Eagles struggle for crowds, with awareness of the team barely registering when it comes to the soccer-obsessed public in the city. If only the sport was being punted with the kind of enthusiastic backing which rugby union receives in South Yorkshire, then this would change. Some serious investment in the marketing of the sport in Sheffield would surely bear fruit, with the two football clubs having had so little to celebrate recently.
The basic structures are all already there in place, thanks to the work of the international coach referred to above.
Sheffield Eagles are a shining testament to the work of Mark Aston and his dedicated team of supporters and backers. The fact that they even exist at all is down to his effort, after the original outfit, Challenge Cup winners in 1998, were clumsily merged with Huddersfield as Super League’s early traumas played themselves out.
He deserves credit for what he has achieved, sometimes in the face of odds which would make a lesser spirit quail. Aston, though, relishes the adversity.
“The club in general has only been going 20-odd years. We’ve only been going 12 as the current regime, and when we took over, there was literally nothing left because of what had happened a couple of years before,” he told Code13, referring to the merger with Huddersfield Giants which saw the original Eagles club effectively cease to exist.
“So now to have all that structure, all those schools and all that community from top to bottom is a tremendous credit to all the guys who have been involved in it.
“But also, it means that it CAN be done.
“Now it’s down to finances. What we want is for people to get on board. The council are still interested. We’re talking to them about what we want to do for 2014-15.
“Sheffield United and Bramall Lane are 100 per cent behind us. The Chamber of Commerce are behind us. Hopefully we’ll be in with a kick next time it comes to licence time.”
In the light of recent comments from Sheffield Eagles director John Whaling, it seems appropriate to re-publish the article here.
If a rugby league club told you that they had the support of the city council and chamber of commerce of the fourth biggest city in England, a place with a large number of well-populated satellite towns, and the backing of the local soccer team who have offered the use of their superb stadium long-term, you would probably think that they were in Super League.
That they have an ex-international player as coach, a charismatic cheerleader for the sport in an area outside of the heartland of the game, would only make them appear more of a top flight outfit. That the city is at the heart of England, a transport hub which connects the east and west coasts and the north to the south east of England, should surely only make it more of a nailed-on top-flight contender. A place where the RFL would surely want to be.
Given the fact that this would also be an ‘expansion’ team, then it might raise even more of an eyebrow of surprise. However, this team is not in Super League, and seems to have been forgotten about when it comes to raising the game’s profile outside of the M62 Corridor. Although it may surprise some people, Sheffield is the city, the Eagles the club.
Sheffield has never been part of rugby league’s heartland. Never. The round ball code has always been king here since the early days of organised ‘football’ in the 19th Century. Two of the world’s oldest football clubs, Hallam FC and Sheffield FC play here, while Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United are two of the game’s most famous names, despite their current lowly league status.
So, although it is in Yorkshire, its sporting culture is significantly different to somewhere like Leeds or Hull. Football, and cricket to some extent, are the chosen pastimes of athletes here, with rugby union well down the list and rugby league rarely mentioned or discussed. This means that, for our sport, it is as much an ‘expansion’ area as North Wales or London.
Yet this seems to have been forgotten by those in the game who crave expansion. Is it because it’s too close to the heartlands, too Northern, too flat cap industrial in the eyes of southerners, to really count as an expansion city?
If so, that is an incredibly short-sighted view. Sheffield has a huge population and huge hinterland and influence which stretches right through vast swathes of the northern and eastern parts of the Midlands. It is a gateway to so many other areas, as well as being in a superb location which enjoys easy transport access however one chooses to travel.
Yet the Eagles struggle for crowds, with awareness of the team barely registering when it comes to the soccer-obsessed public in the city. If only the sport was being punted with the kind of enthusiastic backing which rugby union receives in South Yorkshire, then this would change. Some serious investment in the marketing of the sport in Sheffield would surely bear fruit, with the two football clubs having had so little to celebrate recently.
The basic structures are all already there in place, thanks to the work of the international coach referred to above.
Sheffield Eagles are a shining testament to the work of Mark Aston and his dedicated team of supporters and backers. The fact that they even exist at all is down to his effort, after the original outfit, Challenge Cup winners in 1998, were clumsily merged with Huddersfield as Super League’s early traumas played themselves out.
He deserves credit for what he has achieved, sometimes in the face of odds which would make a lesser spirit quail. Aston, though, relishes the adversity.
“The club in general has only been going 20-odd years. We’ve only been going 12 as the current regime, and when we took over, there was literally nothing left because of what had happened a couple of years before,” he told Code13, referring to the merger with Huddersfield Giants which saw the original Eagles club effectively cease to exist.
“So now to have all that structure, all those schools and all that community from top to bottom is a tremendous credit to all the guys who have been involved in it.
“But also, it means that it CAN be done.
“Now it’s down to finances. What we want is for people to get on board. The council are still interested. We’re talking to them about what we want to do for 2014-15.
“Sheffield United and Bramall Lane are 100 per cent behind us. The Chamber of Commerce are behind us. Hopefully we’ll be in with a kick next time it comes to licence time.”
Zack Wilson is the author of 'Stumbles and Half Slips', available from Epic Rites Press and Amazon.com.
More Sheffield Eagles Anger
Sheffield Eagles director John Whaling has today expressed sentiments which in no way surprise me, but may well have surprised a few at Red Hall,where the Rugby Football League is based.
His statement in full can be read HERE, at the Eagles' official website, but it is worthwhile dwelling in a little more detail on a couple of the points raised.
Whaling said:
"When it was announced that there would be a mini round of licensing in the wake of the Bradford Bulls troubles the press release said it would involve Leigh, Halifax and Featherstone, why was this when Sheffield Eagles had also earned the right to apply for Super League status by virtue of making it to the 2011 Grand Final? When we queried this with the RFL we were told ‘failure to mention Sheffield is probably as a result of journalists errors rather than a proper assessment of which clubs might be a candidate for any mini-licensing process’ however when we queried it with the press we were told it was exactly as sent out by the RFL, it shows that South Yorkshire is nowhere near the front of people’s minds in Red Hall.
"When we queried why nothing had been released congratulating Sheffield and Doncaster on their Grand Final success we were told ‘after the Grand Finals last year we did issue something along those lines and it didn’t get picked up at all’, is this a good reason not to put anything out this year?"
The mealy mouthed nature of this alleged excuse is really something else. Excusing amateurism by saying we thought there was no point in doing it properly is poor.
There is also a coded accusation from Whaling that there is clear bias shown in favour of clubs from the 'heartland' over those in South Yorkshire in the press release. This is strange when the game's governing body is usually so keen to trumpet its achievements with regard to expansion.
Whaling continues:
"The RFL have thrown money at expansion in Wales, London and France and yet the closest place to the heartland receives very little encouragement and no financial support to help expand. Both Sheffield and Doncaster have to battle against other sports, mainly soccer, but the potential in both areas is enormous but we can’t be expected to do everything ourselves when we are already struggling with finance due to a downturn in the corporate market."
My own contact with the RFL regarding this matter has been confusing. The matter of general economic downturn does not seem to factor into their thinking. The fact that they are making money seems to shape a somewhat solipsistic kind of perception of what empty seats are actually caused by, something which is also found in the mainstream rugby league media.
There seems often to be a wilful blindness to just how difficult a task the Eagles have faced in building a club up from basically nothing, to where it is now, arguably, the most successful club currently outside the top flight.
Mark Aston's team has won honours on the pitch, the club has put down firm roots in the community and has contributed to the spread of the amateur game in South Yorkshire. Players from the region are coming through and playing first team rugby league, while there is also a credible commercial plan which has made profit for the last two years running.
There are lessons to be learned from this, for everyone in rugby league. Yet the game's governing bodies seem time and again to avoid mentioning the Eagles at all. One wonders if there is some kind of clash of personalities in play. Perhaps it is just the traditional rivalry of those from the Leeds area with those from the south of the county of Yorkshire, but to draw no attention to the obvious success of what is an expansion side seems ignorant and myopic at best, contrary and stubborn at worst.
His statement in full can be read HERE, at the Eagles' official website, but it is worthwhile dwelling in a little more detail on a couple of the points raised.
Whaling said:
"When it was announced that there would be a mini round of licensing in the wake of the Bradford Bulls troubles the press release said it would involve Leigh, Halifax and Featherstone, why was this when Sheffield Eagles had also earned the right to apply for Super League status by virtue of making it to the 2011 Grand Final? When we queried this with the RFL we were told ‘failure to mention Sheffield is probably as a result of journalists errors rather than a proper assessment of which clubs might be a candidate for any mini-licensing process’ however when we queried it with the press we were told it was exactly as sent out by the RFL, it shows that South Yorkshire is nowhere near the front of people’s minds in Red Hall.
"When we queried why nothing had been released congratulating Sheffield and Doncaster on their Grand Final success we were told ‘after the Grand Finals last year we did issue something along those lines and it didn’t get picked up at all’, is this a good reason not to put anything out this year?"
The mealy mouthed nature of this alleged excuse is really something else. Excusing amateurism by saying we thought there was no point in doing it properly is poor.
There is also a coded accusation from Whaling that there is clear bias shown in favour of clubs from the 'heartland' over those in South Yorkshire in the press release. This is strange when the game's governing body is usually so keen to trumpet its achievements with regard to expansion.
Whaling continues:
"The RFL have thrown money at expansion in Wales, London and France and yet the closest place to the heartland receives very little encouragement and no financial support to help expand. Both Sheffield and Doncaster have to battle against other sports, mainly soccer, but the potential in both areas is enormous but we can’t be expected to do everything ourselves when we are already struggling with finance due to a downturn in the corporate market."
My own contact with the RFL regarding this matter has been confusing. The matter of general economic downturn does not seem to factor into their thinking. The fact that they are making money seems to shape a somewhat solipsistic kind of perception of what empty seats are actually caused by, something which is also found in the mainstream rugby league media.
There seems often to be a wilful blindness to just how difficult a task the Eagles have faced in building a club up from basically nothing, to where it is now, arguably, the most successful club currently outside the top flight.
Mark Aston's team has won honours on the pitch, the club has put down firm roots in the community and has contributed to the spread of the amateur game in South Yorkshire. Players from the region are coming through and playing first team rugby league, while there is also a credible commercial plan which has made profit for the last two years running.
There are lessons to be learned from this, for everyone in rugby league. Yet the game's governing bodies seem time and again to avoid mentioning the Eagles at all. One wonders if there is some kind of clash of personalities in play. Perhaps it is just the traditional rivalry of those from the Leeds area with those from the south of the county of Yorkshire, but to draw no attention to the obvious success of what is an expansion side seems ignorant and myopic at best, contrary and stubborn at worst.
You can read what my thoughts were on this matter earlier this year in the next blog post HERE. This article comes from the Code13 archive, and includes another interesting chat with Mark Aston.
'Stumbles and Half Slips' by Zack Wilson is available from Amazon.com, published by Epic Rites Press.
Tuesday, 9 October 2012
Code13 Archive: Mark Aston, Part One, June 2011
As some of you will know by now, Code13rugbyleague, a website I worked for covering the great game of rugby league, has closed at the end of the 2012 season.
I'm very proud of what the website achieved, and so I'll be reproducing here some of the interviews I conducted with some of rugby league's personalities.
First, and it's somewhat topical considering that his team won the Championship Grand Final this year, is Sheffield Eagles coach Mark Aston.
I spoke to Mark in the summer of 2011 following his appointment as coach of the Ireland rugby league team, a post he continues to fill alongside his duties at the Eagles.
Sheffield Eagles coach Mark Aston was appointed as the new coach of the Ireland rugby League team last week. Code13‘s Zack Wilson caught up with the effervescent Eagles chief this week at Bramall Lane for a chat about Ireland as well RL in Sheffield, Yorkshire’s only rugby league ‘expansion’ city.
In today’s Part One, Mark talks about the challenges of his new role with the Irish. Read Part Two on Friday for his thoughts on the Eagles’ campaign so far…
Congratulations on the appointment Mark. What’s first on the agenda for the job?
I’m on my travels this weekend to Dublin to look around the place. They’ve got a final going on, the Inter-Province final, so I’m going to have a look at the standard of that and see what’s around there.
On Sunday morning I’m actually going to do a bit of a session with the Ireland ‘A’ squad – the Wolfhounds – and have a look at some of those guys.That’s the squad drawn from the domestic league and things like that. So I want to have a look at what it is and where it is and get my own ideas of the standard and, I guess, the task in hand.
What is the appeal of the job? What drew you to the post?
It’s the challenge. Looking at it, it’s like where I was ten years ago with Sheffield Eagles. That’s how I look at it. We had nothing and at least Ireland have got a squad of quality players in there. They dipped last year and they weren’t happy with the standards and performances, but they weren’t happy on a number of other things as well. I aim to resolve those and build a professional environment there and challenge them to be the best they can be.
What do you see as your main tasks?
Structures are a big thing that need looking at, as does coaching over there. I’m not going to be there every week coaching week in and week out, so we need to make sure that we get the structures in place. We need to look at the identification of the Irish squad. I’ve just spoken with Scott Grix, to see about getting a coffee with him and finding out some of the issues they’ve had over the last couple of years. And also making sure that he’s on board, because he was the skipper last year.
It’s not a quick fix, it’s something to build to.
Talking about that, there’s been some high-profile defections from the Ireland squad recently, such as Ben Harrison and Chris Bridge. Have you got a plan for counteracting this kind of draining of talent?
We’ve got to find the next generation. That’s the challenge. What I’m amazed about with Ireland is that they’ve go the senior squad, but underneath the senior squad they’ve got an amateur squad, and I think there’s something missing there like an academy to put in place.
Have any new players expressed an interest in playing for Ireland after your appointment?
I’ve got one here at Sheffield – Vinny Finegan. He’s Irish and he’s put his hand up and said he wants to be part of it. One of the things I’ve always spoken about is getting the youth. Are those players who put up their hands and were part of the 2008 World Cup going to be part of the 2013 World Cup? If they are, then we’ve got four games this year and they’ll have to be putting their hands up for those as well.
You’ll be taking on England, Australia and Fiji at the next World Cup. That must be an exciting for challenge for you?
Fantastic! How good is that for three games? If you want to be on the big stage, then they’re three nations you want to be playing. I’m really looking forward to it, and the guys should be too, but I want them to be preparing now and I want them to feel that when they come into the environment it’s a professional, respectful and disciplined environment.
If we get that right, then look at the players Ireland have got. The Grix brothers, you’ve got people like Pat Richards. There’s others around – Tyrone McCarthy and Tim Bergin. I want the kids who are going to be around for the next few years.
What Ireland is is a passionate nation. That’s what we want in the camp, that passion and pride. Has the sport been going for a few years? Yes, but is it established to the extent it should be? No, and we certainly aim to do that in the next few years. If I can be part of that then I’ll be extremely proud. I just see so many similarities between where Ireland are at now and where I was at Sheffield ten years ago.
I’m sure there are some quality players who are underneath the radar as well. They probably fill the form in and just put England down without thinking whether they’ve got any Irish ancestry. There’s only so many people can play for England, and at the end of the day we want to give opportunity to players.One of my first jobs is to speak to all the heads of youth and find out who actually who is available and capable of playing for Ireland.
Are there are any of Irish RL’s past greats who will be helping out at all? I’m thinking particularly of Brian Carney or Barrie McDermott, though there are many others.
It’s a clean deck at the moment. There’s me in post, and I’ve got to have a look at who I want to be involved. I know who I want to fetch as my assistant -there’s no dount about that. Whether he can commit to that is something that we have to try and resolve over the next week or so. If he can’t, then it’s Plan B I suppose.
What do I see for Brian and Barrie Mac and Terry O’Connor? I had a meeting with Barrie last week about it, and he’s still very supportive of the Ireland team. He wants a new environment. He wants a professional and disciplined environment. That’s what I want. So I can see all three of them having some sort of ambassadorial role, or just being about the place. Obviously they won’t be involved in a coaching role, but they’ve got massive commitments already.
What is your strategy for getting more first generation Irish born and raised players into your group?
Of course we have to do that. I’ve been looking at the list of players they’ve had over the last few years, and who do I want to keep and who interests me and who do I think is going to be around until the 2013 World Cup. We’ve already got people like Tim Bergin (born in County Laoise) in the environment, so I’m looking to see who else is around.
What really does interest me is the academy over there, where a couple of weeks ago some of the Super League clubs went over and the players that had come through the Provinces there, in the academies, they got them together. And I believe that St Helens took a couple on trial, Hull FC took one and I believe Wigan have taken another one. Those people interest me. What does that potentially give my squad? Pride and passion. Maybe they couldn’t quite make it in rugby union, but could they in rugby league? I guarantee you that there will be some skilful and very decent rugby league players there.
Are you eyeing up any rugby union converts at all?
There’s a lot of people in the rugby union system over there. They come through the school environment and go into the academies. But the Ireland RU only keep the cream of the cream. So what happens to the rest? I think those players are highly skilled and they’ll have good habits, good systems and that. Can we transfer their skills into rugby league? I’m sure we can. It’s got to be a lot easier changing from rugby union to league than vice versa. So they do interest me.
I want to build a programme of work over there where we can get an elite training programme, where some of those kids might come over to England for work placements. They might go to Sheffield Eagles, they might go to Wigan, they might go and have a week or a month at a professional club and see what it’s about and smell the Super League environment and see what it’s like to train with the first team and see the intensity. That’s one of the challenges of the job: to see if we can turn some of these rugby union people into rugby league players, and even international players. If we can get one or two of them, then you get three or four, then you can start talking about profile and raising the awareness of Rugby League Ireland.
If we can get that then people will buy into the concept of what we’re trying to do. We need to drive the pride and the passion into rugby league in Ireland and say: “We want Irish people playing rugby league for Ireland.”
Look at what Leinster has done in rugby union. They used to be run by one man and a dog and they used to just get a couple of hundred people watching. Now they’re up to tens of thousands in the crowd week in and week out. People get behind a winning team. That’s what we’ve got to deliver.
That’s why I want to get over there and have a look. Show me what Ireland has got and what I can work with. I want to make Ireland proud of their international rugby league team. The talent is out there, we’ve got to convince them that rugby league is a great game.
Article originally appeared at:
http://www.code13rugbyleague.com/2011/06/01/exclusive-interview-mark-aston-looks-to-build-new-base-for-ireland-rl/
I'm very proud of what the website achieved, and so I'll be reproducing here some of the interviews I conducted with some of rugby league's personalities.
First, and it's somewhat topical considering that his team won the Championship Grand Final this year, is Sheffield Eagles coach Mark Aston.
I spoke to Mark in the summer of 2011 following his appointment as coach of the Ireland rugby league team, a post he continues to fill alongside his duties at the Eagles.
Sheffield Eagles coach Mark Aston was appointed as the new coach of the Ireland rugby League team last week. Code13‘s Zack Wilson caught up with the effervescent Eagles chief this week at Bramall Lane for a chat about Ireland as well RL in Sheffield, Yorkshire’s only rugby league ‘expansion’ city.
In today’s Part One, Mark talks about the challenges of his new role with the Irish. Read Part Two on Friday for his thoughts on the Eagles’ campaign so far…
Congratulations on the appointment Mark. What’s first on the agenda for the job?
I’m on my travels this weekend to Dublin to look around the place. They’ve got a final going on, the Inter-Province final, so I’m going to have a look at the standard of that and see what’s around there.
On Sunday morning I’m actually going to do a bit of a session with the Ireland ‘A’ squad – the Wolfhounds – and have a look at some of those guys.That’s the squad drawn from the domestic league and things like that. So I want to have a look at what it is and where it is and get my own ideas of the standard and, I guess, the task in hand.
What is the appeal of the job? What drew you to the post?
It’s the challenge. Looking at it, it’s like where I was ten years ago with Sheffield Eagles. That’s how I look at it. We had nothing and at least Ireland have got a squad of quality players in there. They dipped last year and they weren’t happy with the standards and performances, but they weren’t happy on a number of other things as well. I aim to resolve those and build a professional environment there and challenge them to be the best they can be.
What do you see as your main tasks?
Structures are a big thing that need looking at, as does coaching over there. I’m not going to be there every week coaching week in and week out, so we need to make sure that we get the structures in place. We need to look at the identification of the Irish squad. I’ve just spoken with Scott Grix, to see about getting a coffee with him and finding out some of the issues they’ve had over the last couple of years. And also making sure that he’s on board, because he was the skipper last year.
It’s not a quick fix, it’s something to build to.
Talking about that, there’s been some high-profile defections from the Ireland squad recently, such as Ben Harrison and Chris Bridge. Have you got a plan for counteracting this kind of draining of talent?
We’ve got to find the next generation. That’s the challenge. What I’m amazed about with Ireland is that they’ve go the senior squad, but underneath the senior squad they’ve got an amateur squad, and I think there’s something missing there like an academy to put in place.
Have any new players expressed an interest in playing for Ireland after your appointment?
I’ve got one here at Sheffield – Vinny Finegan. He’s Irish and he’s put his hand up and said he wants to be part of it. One of the things I’ve always spoken about is getting the youth. Are those players who put up their hands and were part of the 2008 World Cup going to be part of the 2013 World Cup? If they are, then we’ve got four games this year and they’ll have to be putting their hands up for those as well.
You’ll be taking on England, Australia and Fiji at the next World Cup. That must be an exciting for challenge for you?
Fantastic! How good is that for three games? If you want to be on the big stage, then they’re three nations you want to be playing. I’m really looking forward to it, and the guys should be too, but I want them to be preparing now and I want them to feel that when they come into the environment it’s a professional, respectful and disciplined environment.
If we get that right, then look at the players Ireland have got. The Grix brothers, you’ve got people like Pat Richards. There’s others around – Tyrone McCarthy and Tim Bergin. I want the kids who are going to be around for the next few years.
What Ireland is is a passionate nation. That’s what we want in the camp, that passion and pride. Has the sport been going for a few years? Yes, but is it established to the extent it should be? No, and we certainly aim to do that in the next few years. If I can be part of that then I’ll be extremely proud. I just see so many similarities between where Ireland are at now and where I was at Sheffield ten years ago.
I’m sure there are some quality players who are underneath the radar as well. They probably fill the form in and just put England down without thinking whether they’ve got any Irish ancestry. There’s only so many people can play for England, and at the end of the day we want to give opportunity to players.One of my first jobs is to speak to all the heads of youth and find out who actually who is available and capable of playing for Ireland.
Are there are any of Irish RL’s past greats who will be helping out at all? I’m thinking particularly of Brian Carney or Barrie McDermott, though there are many others.
It’s a clean deck at the moment. There’s me in post, and I’ve got to have a look at who I want to be involved. I know who I want to fetch as my assistant -there’s no dount about that. Whether he can commit to that is something that we have to try and resolve over the next week or so. If he can’t, then it’s Plan B I suppose.
What do I see for Brian and Barrie Mac and Terry O’Connor? I had a meeting with Barrie last week about it, and he’s still very supportive of the Ireland team. He wants a new environment. He wants a professional and disciplined environment. That’s what I want. So I can see all three of them having some sort of ambassadorial role, or just being about the place. Obviously they won’t be involved in a coaching role, but they’ve got massive commitments already.
What is your strategy for getting more first generation Irish born and raised players into your group?
Of course we have to do that. I’ve been looking at the list of players they’ve had over the last few years, and who do I want to keep and who interests me and who do I think is going to be around until the 2013 World Cup. We’ve already got people like Tim Bergin (born in County Laoise) in the environment, so I’m looking to see who else is around.
What really does interest me is the academy over there, where a couple of weeks ago some of the Super League clubs went over and the players that had come through the Provinces there, in the academies, they got them together. And I believe that St Helens took a couple on trial, Hull FC took one and I believe Wigan have taken another one. Those people interest me. What does that potentially give my squad? Pride and passion. Maybe they couldn’t quite make it in rugby union, but could they in rugby league? I guarantee you that there will be some skilful and very decent rugby league players there.
Are you eyeing up any rugby union converts at all?
There’s a lot of people in the rugby union system over there. They come through the school environment and go into the academies. But the Ireland RU only keep the cream of the cream. So what happens to the rest? I think those players are highly skilled and they’ll have good habits, good systems and that. Can we transfer their skills into rugby league? I’m sure we can. It’s got to be a lot easier changing from rugby union to league than vice versa. So they do interest me.
I want to build a programme of work over there where we can get an elite training programme, where some of those kids might come over to England for work placements. They might go to Sheffield Eagles, they might go to Wigan, they might go and have a week or a month at a professional club and see what it’s about and smell the Super League environment and see what it’s like to train with the first team and see the intensity. That’s one of the challenges of the job: to see if we can turn some of these rugby union people into rugby league players, and even international players. If we can get one or two of them, then you get three or four, then you can start talking about profile and raising the awareness of Rugby League Ireland.
If we can get that then people will buy into the concept of what we’re trying to do. We need to drive the pride and the passion into rugby league in Ireland and say: “We want Irish people playing rugby league for Ireland.”
Look at what Leinster has done in rugby union. They used to be run by one man and a dog and they used to just get a couple of hundred people watching. Now they’re up to tens of thousands in the crowd week in and week out. People get behind a winning team. That’s what we’ve got to deliver.
That’s why I want to get over there and have a look. Show me what Ireland has got and what I can work with. I want to make Ireland proud of their international rugby league team. The talent is out there, we’ve got to convince them that rugby league is a great game.
Article originally appeared at:
http://www.code13rugbyleague.com/2011/06/01/exclusive-interview-mark-aston-looks-to-build-new-base-for-ireland-rl/
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