THE final whistle blows and we shuffle through rusty iron gates. It’s the early 1980s and we are making our way from a lower-league football ground after another defeat.
Actually, we aren’t making our way. We are being marched along the pavement, all 20 of us visiting fans, by about the same number of police officers who bark at us randomly as if we are slacking en route to the next pile of rocks we have to break.
As we veer away slightly from the main group, a copper puts his hand roughly on my Dad’s shoulder. “Where do you think you’re going?” I’ve never heard him spoken to like this before, even by my Mum when she’s in one of her worst moods. How will he react? He’s a proud man. “I’m going to my bloody car, get off me.” The hand is removed, the copper backs off.
Back then, the nation didn’t indulge in laboured socio- cultural deliberations on hoodies. Stereotyping ruled. So if you were a football fan and attended matches, woe betide — you were a felon. There was no amnesty even for smartly dressed, middle-aged men in zip-up cardies such as Dad.
Stadiums were furbished in the style of the local dog pound and police were encouraged to consider themselves extras in a version of 1984. Clearly, you had to love your football to suffer this level of indignity and mistreatment on a regular basis. We loved our football.
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Meanwhile, so legend has it, rugby league was a sport followed by men forged in the Corinthian spirit. Rival fans stood shoulder to shoulder dipping Wagon Wheels into each other’s Bovril, cheering on both teams, happy-clappy whatever the result.
A new book challenges this image. The Family Game, by “Michael James”, is a familiar tale of ruck’n’roll on the terraces, except that this time the protagonist affixes himself to the divinity of rugby league. Scraps in pubs, town centres and outside grounds in the late 1970s and early 1980s are eagerly detailed by an author unprepared to lend his real name to his magnum opus.
Perhaps this was a wise move because even before publication the partisans were mobilised, threatening in violent and abusive terms anyone — the author and the publishers chiefly — who dared to suggest that there was anything violent and abusive about their beloved sport. As someone brought up in a rugby league heartland, I see much to admire in its fellowship. Unfortunately, it is often conjoined to sanctimony. “There’s never any trouble at t’rugby, not like football,” they say around here in that whiney know-all voice.
As the author himself admits, hooliganism in rugby league was small-scale. All the same, it existed and this serves to highlight the hypocrisy of its relentless crowing over football. It may be less moneyed and intrinsically more mud and thud than our national game, but its players and supporters are that same rough mix of men and women involved in any sport: greedy, generous, flawed, selfish, good-natured, crude, loyal, capricious. And, like it or not, some of their number are prone to violence.
Now, rugby league didn’t put that copper’s hand on my Dad’s shoulder on that rainy afternoon in Chester. Football’s own hooligans were primarily responsible for fostering the hostile environment that police officers felt sanctioned their indiscriminate rudeness. However, every time the oval-ball sport sold itself as an alternative to the nefarious world of football (remember the slogan: “Rugby League: a Man ‘s Game for all the Family”?), it further reinforced the stereotype of the football supporter as a thug.
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Instead of petitioning for sainthood and seeing football’s malaise as a marketing opportunity, perhaps rugby league should have been singing its own song louder. Those crunching tackles, the shimmying and weaving, the exhilaration of the dash to a tryline — this is its real invocation, not merely that it isn’t bad old football.
THE GOOD, BAD AND UGLY SIDE OF RUGBY LEAGUE
Even before The Family Game had been published, supporters rallied to defend their game, flooding the totalrl.com website with e-mails . . .