A Division in Rugby, and in England

But, an outsider might be surprised to hear, there are much finer shadings to English rugby beyond its image of mass pugilism, relating not only to the rules of its two main forms, Rugby Union and Rugby League, but also to a schism between the north and south of the country so deep that The New Statesman magazine devoted a special issue to it. “No part of the country is the subject of greater condescension and misunderstanding than the north of England,” it declared the other day.

That division has split rugby since 1895, when a rebellious group of northern clubs broke away to develop a version of the game with 13 players on each team rather than 15, and other major differences, shocking the southern sporting establishment by actually paying their players to play, compensating blue-collar workers for the wages they forfeited by taking to the field.

Only a century later, in 1995, did Rugby Union — dominant in the south and nationally — go professional, feeding not so much on the ticket money funding Rugby League as on the lucrative television rights and sponsorships that have transformed global sports.

It is not simply the rules and the money that make the difference, as a wealth of recent debate inspired by major tournaments has shown.

The top Rugby League clubs still hail mainly from hardscrabble northern towns, from Leeds to Wigan and Warrington, although London, too, has a team. With its faster, more open play, the writer Anthony Clavane said in The New Statesman, the League game “still has an egalitarian, antiestablishment, strictly northern way of viewing the world.” Indeed, he said, the two rugbys stand for class distinctions that once set “southern gentleman-amateur toffs” against working-class players and their fans. Tied to its northern origins, the sports journalist Michael Calvin wrote in The Independent, Rugby League “remains a prisoner of geography.”

But it is not a perfect metaphor for the nation.

Rugby League, like Rugby Union, has reached around the world, notably to Australia and New Zealand, whose teams fought a breathless World Cup final on Nov. 30 (Australia won, 34-2), and on to the United States and many other lands where Rugby Union dominates.

Like the works of the northern artist L.S. Lowry, Rugby League was set in places where smokestacks poked into leaden skies, spreading a sooty veneer over bowed figures. But, in postindustrial Britain, mills and mines have closed.

“Rugby League Land has been completely transformed,” Mr. Clavane wrote. “The heavy industry that was its staple has gone.”

In response, Rugby League has sought a broader following. The semifinals of the World Cup were played at Wembley stadium in London, the traditional shrine to English soccer, and the finals at Old Trafford — Manchester United’s home ground — drew a record crowd of almost 75,000. The World Cup “spread the game away from League’s traditional heartland” with 40 percent of tickets purchased outside the north, the sports journalist James Riach wrote. “This may well be remembered as the competition that put international Rugby League on the map.”

But if Rugby League is seeking to shrug off its legacy, the north itself seems less nimble. Just about every recent economic yardstick points to a north-south gulf deepened by the years of austerity following the 2008 crisis.

Statistics suggesting that a revival is underway across England cloak sharp regional disparities in house prices, joblessness and other indicators.

“There has been a prosperity gap for at least a century, ever since the industries that were at the forefront of the first industrial revolution went into decline,” the economics writer Larry Elliott said in The Guardian. And these days, “the disparity between a thriving London and the rest has never been greater.”

Article source: http://www.bathchronicle.co.uk/National-Trust-raises-concern-Bath-Rugby-arena/story-20240954-detail/story.html

A Division in Rugby, and in England