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Restoring pride Hanley's Saints ready to redeem ailing British game
Posted: Friday January 21, 2000 12:47 PM
LONDON (Reuters) -- Ellery Hanley, one of the all-time greats of British rugby league, was never one to shirk a challenge, but he will not take responsibility for the ailing British game beyond Saturday's World Club Championship decider. Hanley guided St Helens to last year's English Super League title in his first year as coach, and it meets Australia's champion Melbourne Storm for the World Club Championship at Wigan in a match seen as vital for the beleagured game at home. "It's all about 80 minutes, and whatever happens afterwards doesn't bother me," Hanley said this week. "We're going out to win. Nothing else should concern these players, and nothing will, because they are like an extension of my own arm." "It's all about getting an early touch and an early tackle in." It is in those areas that the British game has failed in recent years and lags behind the southern hemisphere. The onus is on Hanley's Saints to restore some pride on Saturday. Great Britain coach Andy Goodway resigned this week after winning only one test in two and a half years, and the Lions lost heavily to Australia and New Zealand in this year's Tri-Nations series. "The Tri-Nations was a bit of a disaster, but at club and international level we've got loads of talent over here," St Helens captain Chris Joynt said. "But it's the Aussies' national game and they've got six or seven players competing for every place while we've got two or three." "But the fans only want to see winners, and Saturday is a great chance to get some pride back." Redemption chanceMemories of the last World Club Championship are anything but proud for British clubs, however. They played Australia's top-flight home and away in 1997, and won only eight of 62 games, and the format was immediately scrapped. British champions have won four of the five previous one-off challenge games against their Australian counterparts however, and last year's domestic league was of a higher standard and better attended than ever. "We don't believe our players are as bad as was portrayed after the Tri-Nations," Super League chairman Chris Caisley said. "But they haven't had the opportunity until recently to play top quality rugby every week. Next year we'll have 12 highly competitive teams and the quality will rise again." "But people won't believe that until we compete with the southern hemisphere. And Saturday is a chance to show that we can," Caisley said. Sticking with traditionIn the search for quality however, rugby league has sacrificed its attempts to extend the game to more areas of the country.League has spent over a hundred years trying to expand beyond an L-shaped swathe of England, down the northwest coast from the Scottish border to Liverpool, and across through Leeds and Manchester to the east coast, but the 2000 season will see it withdrawing into its heartland. Some clubs that had started up in other areas have been swallowed up by older rivals ahead of the new season beginning in March. Sheffield Eagles' 15 years of existence peaked with victory over Wigan in the 1998 Challenge Cup, but in September its Super League side was subsumed by Huddersfield, where the Rugby league was founded in 1895. The Eagles name survives in a first division club, but the steel city will see only a handful of top-flight games this year from the Huddersfield-Sheffield Giants. In the northeast, Gateshead Thunder attracted above average crowds in 1999 as it just missed out on a playoff spot in their first year. But the Thunder are no more, transferred en-masse to bolster 105-year-old Hull, and Gateshead league fans will have only an amateur and an under-19 team to cheer next year. "There had to be some sort of rationalization," Caisley said this week. "We had to take a step back to go forward, put everything into the heartland and create a solid base from which to expand." "No one is saying expansion is finished, but at the same time we're not going to turn up next year and say let's have a club here and there." All the Super League clubs have reported booming season ticket sales, Caisley said, and he expects a crowd of around 15,000 at Wigan on Saturday. There will be a further injection of support for the game when the rugby league World Cup is held in Britain in October. "We really hope Saints can pull it off on Saturday," Caisley said. "And if anyone can work out how do it, Ellery can."
Copyright 2003 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
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