Rugby Reloaded

123. Prescott's Match and the Secret History of the 1958 Lions Tour by Tony Collins

Of all the football codes, rugby union has faced the most troubled times during the Coronvirus pandemic. Wage disputes, club v country clashes, and the splitting apart of the game in the Southern Hemisphere have thrown the game's long-time issues into sharp light. So, for an insight into the game's problems, this week's episode talks to rugby union analyst Rhiannon Garth Jones about where the sport stands today and where it is going. For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, take a look at www.rugbyreloaded.com (which also has show notes and links for this episode) and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.

Saturday 4 July marked the 50th anniversary of the last time the Great Britain Lions won the rugby league Ashes. This week's episode looks back at the tour which summed up all the political tensions and latent hostilities that exploded between Britain and Australia in the 1960s - and then asks perhaps the most important question in rugby league: why can't the Poms beat the Aussies anymore? For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, take a look at www.rugbyreloaded.com (which also has show notes and links for this episode) and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.

Last week Rugby League Cares, the sport's charitable arm, announced that the new National Rugby League Museum is going to be housed at the George Hotel in Huddersfield, the birthplace of the game. In this special museum episode, I discuss the plans for the museum with Dr Kevin Moore, former CEO of the National Football Museum, and answer listeners' questions about the project.

This week's 'Rugby Reloaded' talks to one of Britain's pioneers in sports performance analysis, Rob Lowe. In the early 1990s Rob founded the first company that collected and analysed rugby league performance stats; from there he moved on to rugby union and soccer, and became a director of Opta Sports. We spoke about the origins of stats, the impact they've had on coaching in the rugby codes, and where they will go in the future.

How do you market Championship (second tier) rugby league? And what difference does promotion and relegation make to marketing strategies?This week's episode talks to marketing expert Kacy Mackreth about her research into the marketing (or lack thereof) of rugby below the Super League level. What went wrong with the licensing, or franchise, model and how badly did the Middle-Eight play-off formula turn out? For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, take a look at www.rugbyreloaded.com (which also has show notes and links for this episode) and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.

Are Crystal Palace the oldest professional soccer club in the world? I'm joined this week again by Dr Kevin Moore to discuss whether Palace's recent claim has any substance (spoiler alert: no) and, more importantly, to ask what exactly is football history and how we should do it. For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, take a look at www.rugbyreloaded.com (which also has show notes and links for this episode) and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.

Where does British rugby league go after the pandemic? This week's 'Rugby Reloaded' welcomes back former St Helens CEO Sean McGuire to look at the tasks facing rugby league in the new post-Covid (perhaps) future. We discuss transparency in the game, deferential attitudes, 'Workington Man', the need for an independent strategic report into the game and pretty much everything else. For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, take a look at www.rugbyreloaded.com (which also has show notes and links for this episode) and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.

For seventy years, the axis of world supremacy in rugby union revolved around New Zealand and South Africa. This week's episode examines how that rivalry was fueled in the inter-war years, via drawn test series, contrasting styles, national pride and, crucially, the exclusion of Maori and all dark-skinned players to appease South Africa's racist policies. If you want to understand Southern Hemisphere rugby union today, this is the key. For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, take a look at www.rugbyreloaded.com (which also has show notes and links for this episode) and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.

In May 1996 Wigan played union and Bath played league in a historic clash of the rugby codes. Each won a match in their own code but, between the two matches, Wigan also won union's Middlesex 7s. It was 100 years since rugby's great split, but the differences that tore the game apart then were just as apparent in 1996. The playing styles and stereotypes of the Victorian age continued to burn brightly - the games were not just a clash of the codes, they were also a clash of cultures. For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, take a look at www.rugbyreloaded.com (which also has show notes and links for this episode) and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.

Is soccer the original form of football that was played in pre-industrial times? But modern soccer looks nothing like the ancient forms of folk football - and for its first few years it was barely distinguishable from rugby. So how did it become the most popular type of football? This week's episode examines whether it was soccer's rules that made it popular or something much more fundamental in late-Victorian Britain. For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, take a look at www.rugbyreloaded.com (which also has show notes and links for this episode) and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.

In the 1980s, few players bestrode rugby league like Kiwi Olsen Fillipaina. Size, speed, skills and a football super-brain, Olsen had it all. But perhaps even more importantly, he became a symbol of the emergence of Pacific Island players in rugby league and a genuine insipration to those who came after him. But being a pioneer takes its toll, and Olsen suffered from vicious racism and unsympathetic coaches. Patrick Skene's new book 'The Big O. The Life and Times of Olsen Filipaina, Pacific Revolution Pioneer' tells Olsen's story in its full glory, and charts the rise of rugby league's Pacific revolutionaries. For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, take a look at www.rugbyreloaded.com (which also has show notes and links for this episode) and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.

This week's episode talks to Dr Kevin Marston about his research into the short history of America's first football club, Oneida FC of Boston, which was formed in 1862 in the midst of the American Civil War. What link did it have to American football and soccer and, perhaps even more intriguingly, how has its story been used by supporters of both codes to legitimise their heritage? It's a dispute that is still being played out, as controversy reigns about the shape of the ball on the monument to the club on Boston Common. For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, take a look at www.rugbyreloaded.com (which also has show notes and links for this episode) and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.

This week's 'Rugby Reloaded' travels back in time to ancient China with Dr Kevin Moore to look at the incredible history of Cuju, the ball game that survived in China for 2,000 years. Was it the forerunner of modern football, as Sepp Blatter once claimed, or was it something far richer and more complex? For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, take a look at www.rugbyreloaded.com (which also has show notes and links for this episode) and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.

This week's 'Rugby Reloaded' goes audio-visual and looks at the Mitchell & Kenyon rugby films of 1901-03. These are the earliest collection of rugby films from almost the dawn of moving pictures, and were filmed just as the Northern Union was mid-way in its evolution from rugby union rules to what became rugby league. And they also show some of the early giants of the sport - Dicky Lockwood, Albert Goldthorpe and James Lomas - in action. To watch the videos discussed in the podcast, go to https://bit.ly/3b6lZ1u For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, take a look at www.rugbyreloaded.com (which also has show notes and links for this episode) and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.

This bonus episode of 'Rugby Reloaded' talks about the 'Life Without League: Rugby at the Time of Coronavirus' project with Dr Victoria Dawson. She started the project to encourage people to keep diaries during the extraordinary times we currently live in. We discuss the importance of diaries for historians of the game, how they help us reconstruct the past, how we should look at the history of rugby league, and of course, why you should keep a diary! For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, take a look at www.rugbyreloaded.com (which also has show notes and links for this episode) and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.

This week's episode of ‘Rugby Reloaded’ goes back to August 1914 to explore how rugby league dealt with the global crisis of World War One. Just like today, the game faced pressures to stop playing, underwent unprecedented financial problems, and had to restructure itself. How did it find a way forward? This is the second of a two part episode that looks at the impact of war on the game - listen to episode 105 for part one. For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, go to www.rugbyreloaded.com (which also has show notes and links for this episode) and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.

This week's 'Rugby Reloaded' looks at the new Netflix series about the early years of English soccer 'The English Game'. Does it present an accurate account of the rise of working-class teams in soccer and the importance of Scottish players to the game? Or is it ultimately a romantic defence of the British class system and a distortion of the history of football? The episode also sheds new light on the 'Scotch Professors' and the 'shock of the new' that football represented at the turn of the 1870s. For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, take a look at www.rugbyreloaded.com (which also has show notes and links for this episode) and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.

The new ‘Rugby Reloaded’ looks at the last time British rugby league faced a global crisis: the outbreak of World War Two. How did it cope with travel restrictions, stadium requisitioning and equipment rationing? What was the response of players and fans? This is the first of a two part episode that looks at the impact of war on the game. For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, take a look at www.rugbyreloaded.com (which also has show notes and links for this episode) and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.

his special edition of 'Rugby Reloaded' looks back at how rugby responded to the 1904 smallpox epidemic in West Yorkshire, and asks are there lessons to be learned for today? For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, take a look at www.rugbyreloaded.com and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.