London Calling?

Yet another review into the future of rugby league, this time by consultants IMG, has concluded that what the sport really needs is a top flight London team, pointing to the healthy attendance at Arsenal's stadium for England's World Cup semi-final against Samoa last month, in contrast to a lower turnout for their opening match of the competition in Newcastle.

The idea of a London club in the top flight of rugby league is not a new one: Wigan Highfield relocated to the White City stadium in the early thirties and Fulham FC established a side to play at their Craven Cottage ground in the early eighties, while semi-professional teams London Broncos and Skolars still exist lower down the league structure, the former having played in the Super League before.

There has always been a tension in rugby league between concentrating resources on the game's Northern heartlands and attempting to extend its appeal beyond them, which in the twentieth century was reflected in a long debate amongst its governing bodies as to whether the Challenge Cup Final should be played at Wembley, and while some expansion projects have flourished, notably Australasia and France, others have spectacularly foundered, including Paris, Newcastle, Wales and Toronto, although the last was really scuppered by the travel restrictions brought in at the start of the Covid pandemic rather than a lack of public interest.

The game's authorities have two groups of supporters in mind for a London team: rugby league fans from the North who now live there, and potential new converts from rugby union, who they think can be won over by the sport's innate strengths (tough tackling, speedy passing and running with the ball, and an emphasis on try scoring rather than penalties, scrums and kicking into touch), as well as the kind of casual spectator who turned up at Arsenal's stadium a few weeks ago, and has largely filled the seats for the NFL International Series since it was first played in the capital in 2007, and which has also led to calls for a team in North America's biggest sports competition to be (re)located here.

Ultimately what a London based club really needs to take off though is a production line running through schools, junior amateur sides and its own academy to provide a stream of talented young players, rather than having to rely on expensive imports from the North and Australasia.

Books of the Year

I seem to have read a few more books than normal this year, partly because I've got into online and eBooks (Project Gutenberg is a good resource for that). Many of my choices have been inspired by watching TV or film adaptations of novels.

The Adventures of Phillip by William Makepeace Thackeray

I started the year with the sequel to the unfinished novel I ended 2021 with, A Shabby Genteel Story.

The Path to Rome by Hilaire Belloc 

Belloc was a great walker and this travel journal with his own illustrations documents the pilgrimage he made in 1902 from Toul, the French town where he had completed his military service, to Rome.

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

I've had this on my bookshelves for years, and finally got round to reading it after seeing another TV adaptation of it. 

The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni

A very topical novel set in a plague struck seventeenth century Lombardy, with both religious and class themes.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

I read this after watching the film, which has significant plot differences from the novel. Steinbeck interleaves his tale of Dust Bowl refugees in thirties California with political commentary generalising from the experiences of its characters.

Don't Look Now by Daphne Du Maurier

A classic example of how you can turn a longish short story  into a two hour film.

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust

Having read Swann's Way, the first volume of Proust's famously long novel In Search of Lost Time, I moved onto the second, in which the upper class Parisian characters travel to a Normandy seaside resort for the summer.

The Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France

France appears as a character in Proust, which led me to this, his best known work.

The Card by Arnold Bennett

Having lived in Stoke as a student in the early nineties, I recognised many of the locations in this Potteries-set comic novel about an ambitious young man.

Walking the Woods and the Water by Nick Hunt

A modern recreation of Patrick Leigh Fermor's classic interwar tramp across Central Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.

The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musill

Also set in Central Europe, at a military academy on the edge of the Austria-Hungarian empire before WWI, this novel strongly prefigures the militarism and fascism about to overwhelm the continent.

Hell Is A City by Maurice Proctor

I blogged about the film based on this Mancunian detective thriller here, although there's a major plot difference at the end of the novel.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

I think we all know what this book is about.

Ritual by David Pinner

The novel on which the film The Wicker Man is loosely based, although again there are major plot differences.

Adam Bede/Felix Holt/Middlemarch by George Eliot

A midsummer blitz of works by the English Midlands most famous novelist.

The Professor/Villette by Charlotte Brontë

Some unkind critics have claimed that this is really the same novel written twice, one with a male and the other a female protagonist, and both draw on the author's experiences teaching at a school in Brussels.

The Last Man by Mary Shelley

Political crisis wracks England as a mysterious virus from the Far East sweeps across Europe and climate change threatens human existence in this prophetic sci-fi novel.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John Le Carré

Somewhat ironically, I read this Cold War spy thriller straight through while sheltering indoors on the hottest day of the year.

The Decembrists/The Devil by Leo Tolstoy

An unfinished sequel to the much longer War and Peace, although started before it, and a short story about a love triangle involving a rich young man who inherits a country estate.

The Misfits by Arthur Miller

A cinematic novel based on the screenplay for the modern Western which was the last film of both Miller's then wife Marilyn Monroe and her co-star Clark Gable.

The Attack on the Mill/The Flood/The Fête at Coqueville by Émile Zola

Having  read most of his Rougon-Macquart series of novels, I whipped through a few of Zola's short stories, the first two about disasters striking rural communities, and the last a comedy about washed up barrels of wine overcoming ancient enmities in a Normandy fishing village.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Grahame based the character of Toad in his Thamesside children's story on the politician Horatio Bottomley, but his boundless ego and reckless self-promotion inevitably brings to mind the first of this year's three Prime Ministers.

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

You can't read this novel, which combines espionage, comedy, romance and religion, without thinking of the title character in the film version played by Alec Guinness (like Greene, a convert to Catholicism who often struggled with his faith).

 

 

Advance Australia's Pair

A day before the football World Cup kicks off atop the graves of thousands of migrant workers killed building the stadia for it in Qatar, the Australian men's and women's teams both lifted the top prize in a double header final of the Rugby League World Cup at Old Trafford this afternoon.

You could probably have put both Australian teams down as trophy winners before they boarded the plane from the Antipodes; the only real surprise was that it was Samoa that the men's team beat in the final, after the Pacific Islanders' shock extra time golden point drop goal victory against hosts England in the semi-final at Arsenal's stadium last Saturday afternoon.

The dominance of Australia in international rugby league - with a dozen World Cup wins out of the fifteen contested since the first in France in 1954 - is down to a number of things: the Australasian NRL is the top level, and highest paid, domestic competition in the world, attracting the best young players from both Europe and the Pacific Islands; League is not only the leading rugby code in Australia, but also the foremost sport in the big cities on its eastern coast, with youth systems feeding a stream of talent into its clubs and the national side; and in the women's game, the female version of the NRL is now fully professional, hence the achievement of England's semi-pro women in reaching a semi-final against today's runners-up New Zealand.

There's lots to celebrate from this World Cup, including the emergence of Pacific Island quarter finalists Tonga and Samoa alongside established rugby league nation Papua New Guinea, the expansion of the women's competition, and England winning the wheelchair final at Manchester Central last night - I'm already looking forward to the 2025 tournament in France.

Champion Ale

I picked up a bottle of McEwan's Champion Ale from Sainsbury's last week. I'd seen mixed reviews of it online, but you can't really go wrong at £1.50 for almost a pint of a 7.3% beer. A strong ale in the Scottish "wee heavy" style, it was first sold in 1998 after winning a competition, hence the name, and is the British version of a beer brewed for the Belgian market, 8% Gordon's Scotch Ale.

William McEwan's, who began brewing at Fountainbridge on the outskirts of Edinburgh in 1856, joined the twentieth century merry-go-round of brewery mergers and acquisitions by linking up with local rivals William Younger's to form Scottish Brewers in 1931, before becoming part of Scottish & Newcastle in 1960 (one of my childhood memories is of driving into Manchester along Princess Parkway past their Moss Side brewery with the McEwan's Laughing Cavalier on the side) and then Heineken in 2008; their beers are now brewed by Marston's at the former Wells & Young Eagle Brewery in Bedford.

The label describes the beer as "smooth, full-bodied and complex", and it's certainly that. The first thing that hits you as you pour it into the glass is the waft of alcohol. There's quite a pronounced metallic taste and some sherryish notes, a bit like Fuller's 1845, one of the few remaining Burton ales, a style not a million miles away from Scottish "wee heavy".

I expect a few similar beers will be brewed for the coronation of King Charles III next summer.

Up for the Cup?

I watched Australia's 84-0 demolition of Scotland in the Rugby League World Cup last night, in front of a sparse crowd in that hotbed of the sport, Coventry.

Surely the time has come for a two-tier competition in which the lower ranked nations play amongst themselves before one of them joins the three top teams, Australia, New Zealand and England, in the knockout stages.  I'm all for spreading and developing the game around the world, but one-sided contests like last night's don't help anyone.

The sport should probably also look at excluding some of the artificial teams that are now turning up to World Cups, representing countries where the game isn't played at professional level and there's little public interest in it (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Jamaica, Greece, Italy and Lebanon), made up of players who hail from Sydney or Salford rather than Sorrento or Skiathos and are the distant descendants of immigrants from them, making them in effect Australia and England "B" sides.

Australia's opening match at Headingley last Saturday night was also sparsely attended, despite Leeds being on the M62 corridor that runs through rugby league's heartlands. The postponement of the competition because of Covid and rising inflation have both pushed up costs, just as the disposable income of fans has dipped,  and the price of tickets is now likely to be beyond the pockets of many diehards, let alone the casual spectator outside the areas where the game has traditionally been played who might otherwise have been prepared to pay for one as a one-off experience. 

Heading for trouble

I watched a TV programme last night in which the former England rugby union hooker Steve Thompson, now 42, described the distressing effects early onset dementia is having on him, his wife and their young children.

Brain damage caused by repeated blows to or pressure on the head is an issue for several professional sports and has also been linked to motor neurone disease. The things he called for – longer breaks between matches, no concussive collisions in training sessions and better care of players during and after their careers – would obviously be welcome, but I get the feeling that they aren't going to be enough and far more radical solutions will be needed for these sports to continue without inflicting more misery on those taking part in them in future.

One of the problems he identified is that not only are rugby players, both league and union, running at each other faster than before but they're also much bigger, so weight restrictions are probably now needed, as well as an end to contested scrums. American football will have to ban helmets too, football heading (the lighter ball doesn't seem to make much difference) and boxing shots to the head. It'll make for very different games, but better that than the ongoing carnage we're seeing now.

The Queen in Stockport

I happened to be in a pub in Stockport, meeting up with a few mates who I hadn't seen for a couple of years because of Covid, when the news came that the Queen had died, almost a fortnight ago now.

I knew when I left home to catch the train to Stockport that the Queen was seriously ill and that it was possible she might die in the next few hours, and wondered what would happen if she did – would the pub shut, or people sit silently over their drinks in a mournful atmosphere? – but in the end a bloke at the bar asked his mate if he thought they'd get the day off for the funeral and they laughed and things carried on pretty much as normal. Later, we walked back down the hill to the station and there were groups of people coming along Wellington Road in high spirits on an evening out, which would have been unthinkable seventy years ago I reckon.

Funnily enough, the only time I saw the Queen, quite by accident, was at Stockport station in 2004, when I was dropping some relatives off there and her train came in on the next platform - she was on her way to what was then the Royal Manchester School for the Deaf, and I to work as one of her civil servants at the social security office across the road, where, given my republican sympathies, the telling of my encounter with our employer was met with some mirth.

I'd travelled into Stockport on the train a couple of times before in the last few months, for the beer festival at the football ground and the evening at Ye Olde Vic to celebrate it having been in the Good Beer Guide for 21 years, but on both occasions had left the station by the approach on the Edgeley side, so hadn't seen the new buildings around it or the bus interchange going up in the shell of the old one.