Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Being Eddie Waring: The Life and Times of a Sporting Icon
On Behalf of the Committee: A History of Northern Comedy
Tries and Prejudice: The Autobiography of Ikram Butt, England’s First Muslim Rugby International
Slouching Towards Blubberhouses: A Guided Tour of Yorkshireness
As contributing editor:
Seasons in the Sun: A Rugby Revolution
13 Inspirations: The Guiding Lights of Rugby League
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Tony Hannan 2017
Cover design by Andy Allen/TW
Cover photograph © Paul Butterfield
Tony Hannan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For Paul
My brother
Sport, sport, masculine sport, equips a young man for society.
– Keynsham, Bonzo Dog Band, Liberty Records, 1969
I’m from Batley, for goodness sake. No one is gay in Batley …
– Keegan Hirst, August 2015
MOUNTAINS ARE SACRED places. It has been so since mankind first gazed at their summits and thought them heavenly.
For it is on a mountain that a tribe stands closest to its gods; where divine breath might favour upturned faces.
And it is in their foothills that a human being might ponder his or her own brief mortality and significance in the universe.
Mountains mean stories. They speak of legends and heroic deeds – Mount Sinai, where Moses received the Ten Commandments; Mount Etna, beneath which Vulcan hammers in his Roman smithy; Mount Kailash, home of Hindu deity Shiva; Mount Olympus, of course, battlefield of the Titans, begetter of athletes and the Olympic Games, arena of Greek gods. Mountains attract devotees as shepherds gather flocks.
And where there are mountains, there are very often rivers, rivers of ice and fire and water, rivers of time.
In the town of Batley, in what used to be the West Riding of Yorkshire, it is to Mount Pleasant that the faithful come. Though no longer, it must be admitted, in any great number and with little expectation of paradise.
But then mountains are also there to be climbed.
Sunday, 20 September 2015; Batley v Hunslet, 60–12, the final game of the season
The mastodon bellow of an air horn brings exhaustion and relief. Keegan Hirst, 27-year-old captain of Batley rugby league club, feels it as much as anyone. Yet for the 6 ft 4 in. prop forward, what might have been the end of days instead heralds a whole new beginning.
The season just gone was gruelling and frustrating. Having spent most of it at the wrong end of the Championship table – rugby league’s twelve-team second tier – survival had only now been assured. The Bulldogs went well in some games, not so well in others, but with Hirst leading from the front – literally – what had really made the job tougher was the sheer volume of narrow defeats.
That Batley, also known as the Gallant Youths, were in such a scrap at all owed much to the latest rugby league ‘innovation’ as the game moved into its so-called ‘new era’: a shake-up that to many was about as comprehensible as a quadratic equation. After twenty-three games, a three-way divisional split had taken place ahead of a seven-game mini-season, when the top eight teams in the northern hemisphere’s elite competition, Super League, hived off towards play-offs and a high-profile Grand Final at Old Trafford. Super League’s bottom four then joined the Championship’s leading quartet in what were now to be known as the Qualifiers, or middle eight. For these clubs, the points-slate was wiped clean, as previously they’d competed in different competitions. Here, the top three returned to Super League in 2016, with a fourth promotion place up for grabs courtesy of a heavily hyped ‘Million Pound Game’ in which those finishing fourth and fifth participated.
Below that, in the bottom eight, Batley joined fellow remaining Championship sides Featherstone, Dewsbury, London, Workington, Whitehaven and cellar dwellers Hunslet and Doncaster – at least one of whom, in most other years, would by now have been demoted to League 1, the rebranded and geographically diverse ‘third division’ beneath the Championship. This year, though, the fight was still on to avoid those two relegation spots. And at the top of these ‘after eights’, a new trophy was on offer, the Championship Shield, though no one seemed overly excited about lifting it.
Come season’s end, Doncaster, rock bottom on two points with only a solitary win, took the drop as expected. For Batley, however, the margin between them and the Mount’s final visitors, Hunslet Hawks, had been far too close for comfort, Batley having ended the regular season in ninth on fourteen points, Hunslet eleventh on ten. At least it hadn’t been as fraught as 2014, when only the overturning of a points-deduction for fielding an ineligible player kept Batley up and sent Keighley down instead.
To their critics, the Super 8s were ludicrously over-complicated – what was wrong with two up, two down? Yet as a replacement for a licensing system perceived as a failure on many levels, at least Championship clubs could now plot a course to the Promised Land, no matter how convoluted or unlikely the route. Not that anyone in Batley was for the moment concerned with that. They just wanted yet another interminable and disappointing campaign that had more latterly assumed cliffhanger proportions over and done with.
Back on August bank holiday Monday, Batley had viewed their trip to Featherstone’s Big Fellas stadium as just another fixture to tick off the list, thinking themselves all but safe from relegation. By the end of that day, however, the trapdoor still gaped terrifyingly open.
Having kicked off the Super 8s four points clear of Hunslet, Batley had been beaten by Workington and Dewsbury in games one and two. The Hawks, though, mirrored those losses and failed to make up ground. So when the Bulldogs then went to already doomed Doncaster in game three, anything other than victory was unthinkable. A nervy win duly delivered, all they could do was wait. If the South Leeds side had lost in London, as seemed likely, the task was complete. Batley would hold a six-point advantage that, together with a vastly superior points difference and only eight points left to play for, would as good as see them home. And when the result reached local radio, they could indeed relax. Hunslet were losers in the capital, the Bulldogs confirmed safe.
But wait: this was Batley, wasn’t it? When is anything so straightforward in Batley? In a twist worthy of a dodgy soap opera, the bloke on the radio apologized. The Hawks hadn’t lost in London at all. In fact, they had beaten the Broncos 41–24, for only their sixth win of the season. The four-point gap was retained: as you were. What came next would enter Mount Pleasant folklore.
A trip to Featherstone is seldom less than daunting, but given that Hunslet faced a long-haul trip to Whitehaven, defeat at the Big Fellas now seemed to matter little. By tradition, Cumbria is never an easy place to play and Haven had plenty at stake themselves. Surely at worst another weekend’s fixtures would be crossed off and, with only three matches then ahead, fears of relegation calmed.
Batley, though, were not about to leave it to chance. Level at halftime, having dug in with resilience, their forward domination was such that they’d established a 26–6 lead with six minutes to go. But if a twenty-point margin over the eventual Shield winners wasn’t enough of a surprise, with the clock counting down and the game almost up for the hosts, Rovers suddenly found their scoring touch. A trio of tries, two converted, and it was 22–26. Thrilling stuff but too little, too late, as the cliché goes. The hooter sounded just as Featherstone, a yard from their own line, hoofed the ball upfield, apparently to nowhere.
The kick was little more than defiance, a futile punt and hope. So when Batley’s stocky left-winger Shaun ‘Ainy’ Ainscough pouched it on the bounce, that seemed to be that. A player of such talent and top-flight experience could manage this in his sleep. Find the nearest opponent and take the tackle, Ainy. Jog into touch. Heck, knock on and pick it up again if you must. At the next stoppage, the game and worry would be over.
In fact, about the only thing Ainscough ought not to have done is exactly what he did. In acres of space and under no pressure at all, he too kicked the ball wildly in the air – whether going for touch on the far side of the field or simply in joy, who knew? The end result was the same. In the time it takes a man to groan ‘What have I done?’, Rovers’ winger Will Sharp had collected the loose kick and bounced over for a try in the corner.
There was still a tough conversion for Paul Sykes to negotiate. At that stage, Batley thought a draw would be enough. But as the kick sailed through the posts for a 28–26 home win and the clips on social media went viral, confirmation came through of the Hawks’ 30–16 victory over Whitehaven. The pair of tries Ainy had contributed to an astonishing game were now forgotten in the fuss.
‘I was just celebrating, wasn’t I?’ he would say later. ‘I thought the whistle had been blown.’ He had tried to leap on teammate Alex Brown, who said, ‘Ainy, what are you doing?’ and began to run. Going back into the changing room had been ‘pretty bad’. Ainscough’s rash kick could have proved disastrous. The incident would take him weeks to get over, though one day he might laugh about it.
This was, however, no time to panic. Three games left and two points in it, with that for-and-against ratio added security. Next week, though, playing Doncaster at home, Hunslet had a good chance to draw level in the table and Batley would face a desperate Whitehaven, thankfully at the Mount. How would that sickening late capitulation affect them psychologically? And with Hunslet meeting Featherstone, and Batley off to London after that, the stakes on the final weekend, when Hunslet were due at Batley, were set to be high.
Doncaster put up more of a struggle than expected but still went down, 25–16. Thankfully, with Keegan Hirst on the scoreboard, Whitehaven were walloped 50–0 and so the story continued. ‘Never mind the Million Pound Game, we’re heading for the Million Lira Game,’ joked one online wag. But on the penultimate weekend the matter was finally, if not absolutely, put to bed. Despite another valiant display, Hunslet only just came up short against Featherstone on the Friday night, 18–10. Barring a mathematical miracle, Batley ought therefore to be safe, even though they then went down 50–16 in the capital. Whitehaven too were out of the mire. Upshot: the last game would now be a more relaxed affair, a points difference of about minus four hundred to minus one hundred saw to that. Not many games finish 150–0.
And lo, it came to pass that Hunslet made their short trip to Batley for a match watched by 737 spectators, the culmination of a season intended to revolutionize rugby league’s appeal.
Mount Pleasant is a common enough name, with equivalents from Ballarat to Tennessee. There is even a Mount Pleasant on the Falkland Islands – in that instance an RAF base; its use is usually a clue that someone had a sense of humour. This particular Mount Pleasant, perched high over Batley town centre, is riddled with history, although its biggest fans would have to agree that the area has seen better days. During the Industrial Revolution perhaps, when, as with many a northern town and city, money was there to be made and workers were dying to make it in the region’s mills, factories and coalmines.
Survival demanded ingenuity, brute force and mental and physical toughness amid the wind-blown craggy uplands and valleys of what is known, nostalgically, as the Heavy Woollen District. The chief industry by a distance was textiles. The area was famed for the manufacture of ‘shoddy’, rags recycled into coats, blankets and military uniforms, a business wherein fortunes were made. This was an age when, wherever you stood on Batley’s then-cobbled streets, upwards of sixty mill chimneys muddied the sky.
The town motto: floreat industria – may industry flourish.
Batley’s economic standing would never be higher. When the sun set on Victoria’s empire, the town dwindled both in prestige and population to the 50,000 inhabitants of various religions and cultures it houses today. But wealth ought not only to be measured in finance. In areas like Skelsey Row, it was effluence rather than affluence that trickled down, such slum sites familiar with typhoid, scarlet fever, consumption, diphtheria and other such catastrophes, but strangers to sanitation, food in bellies and a decent living wage. Community spirit was the only affordable safety valve; there was a lot of it about.
Religion too was ever present, though not of the establishment type. With Dewsbury, Heckmondwike, Ossett and satellites such as nearby Birstall and Mirfield, Batley developed into a Methodist and Congregationalist stronghold. The district’s hundred or more chapels – rather than churches – earned it a reputation for non-conformity, pragmatism and a fierce independent spirit: the ideal birthplace for a code of football that since 1895 has needed all of that and more.
Since December 2014, the Mount, a few hundred metres’ steep climb out of the town centre, has been known as the Fox’s Biscuits Stadium, thanks to the sponsorship of Batley’s biggest employer. Having reached its peak, a visitor might take a seat in the Glen Tomlinson Stand.
Tomlinson, an Australian half-back, was a fixture here over a couple of stints from the early 1990s, sandwiching spells at top-flight Bradford, Hull and Wakefield. A popular figure, as having his name on the main grandstand attests, he scored a club record-breaking 124 tries in his two spells at Batley, before Craig Lingard – who is still around as assistant coach – surpassed that total in 2006.
But that’s how it is here. Stand still for five minutes and they are apt to pop a little copper plaque on you, or bless a burger van in memory of your granddad. A commendable impulse, though a visitor could be forgiven for wondering if such heightened reverence for the past might not also betray deeper uncertainty about the future.
Today’s opponents are strapped even more tightly to their historical life-support machine. In 1971, Hunslet’s home since 1888, Parkside, fell prey to arson. The disaster heralded dissolution, then rescue, a tricky rebirth and years of precariousness thereafter. In 1980–81, Batley’s centenary season, this year’s relegation rivals were even forced to share Mount Pleasant for a while, having lost tenancy at Elland Road greyhound stadium. Since when, an undermining of the traditional industrial working class experienced right across England’s north has ensured that it is survival, not glory, which keeps crowds nowadays numbered in hundreds rather than thousands nibbling at their admittedly cleaner fingernails.
Nevertheless, in defiance of such monumental forces of social upheaval, a thankless task goes on. Like Sisyphus pushing his rock, Hunslet RLFC is determined to endure. As the club song has it: We’ve swept the seas before, boys, and so we shall again. Maybe, by sheer force of obstinacy or some sort of miracle, they will. Last year, after all, they gained promotion. Today, though, the rock will roll all the way down to the lowest level of the semi-pro game, money-spinning matches against Leigh, Bradford and Featherstone replaced by thankless trips to Oxford, Merthyr Tydfil and Gloucestershire.
Keegan Hirst wins the toss, so Batley play uphill, just as they like it. The tallest man on the field, he almost scores the opening try, but the offload from fellow prop Alex Rowe is deemed forward.
Given his height and stature, Hirst stands out; he is head and shoulders above everyone else, both physically and in performance. Physiology by Michelangelo, locomotive heart, he leads by example, hammering at Hunslet’s middle defence repeatedly, the combination of ferocity and graceful handling remarkable in such a frame. In rugby league, men must be strong and men must be exceptional. Hirst is both. He is also currently the most famous man in a sport more usually starved of media attention, especially at this level.
Keegan: it’s an unusual name for a Batley lad, brought up a fifteen-minute walk away. ‘My mam says it’s nothing to do with Kevin,’ he says. ‘It was in a book and she liked it. It’s Irish. She thought it sounded nice.’ Keegan has no Irish in him, so far as he is aware. Nice. Around here, it’s important to be nice.
Prior to Sunday, 16 August 2015, when his homosexuality was revealed in the Sunday Mirror, ‘Keegs’ wasn’t guaranteed recognition in the town of his birth, let alone the game he plays wholeheartedly. What reputation he had was of a solid journeyman prop in a division noticed by few. Another workhorse front-rower whose contribution even the most fanatical rugby league devotee might miss. Rugged, brave, dependable, yes, but then those are the qualities required of anyone brave or daft enough to step out on to a rugby field.
The reaction to his coming out, though, was extraordinary. When news broke on social media that an exclusive was on its way, the sport’s followers went on the defensive – another hatchet job, no doubt. Yet the story was nothing of the sort.
‘At first, I couldn’t even say “I’m gay” in my head, let alone out loud,’ said this northern working-class tough guy, product of a rough tough council estate, whose previous jobs included builder, nightclub doorman and factory worker. ‘I feel like I’m letting out a long breath that I’ve hold in for a long time.’ Over a two-page spread, the article revealed how the married father-of-two had finally ‘found the words’ to explain to wife Sara that they could no longer be together. He had told her he was gay a few weeks ago. ‘She blamed herself when we separated but I knew she’d done nothing wrong. I couldn’t bear it any more, the guilt of it all, of her not knowing why I left. It was eating me up.’ Hirst explained how, when the couple met to discuss the matter at the kitchen table, his stomach was ‘in knots’. He couldn’t get his words out, felt like he was going to be sick. ‘She didn’t say anything at first. I explained why and how I felt; it was very emotional.’
Though Sara was ‘surprised and angry’ to begin with, she was now supportive about a ‘weird situation’ that Hirst confessed to having found liberating. It was good to be out of denial and not only from a personal point of view, going by an A-list celebrity response that included a telephone call from Elton John, who reportedly told Hirst he was ‘fabulous’. The chattering social media class was swift to wish him well – Stephen Fry pitched in, as did Harry Potter actor Emma Watson. ‘Courage is the choice and willingness to confront agony, pain, danger, uncertainty or intimidation,’ she wrote. ‘Physical courage is courage in the face of physical pain, hardship, death or threat of death, while moral courage is the ability to act rightly in the face of popular opposition, shame, scandal or discouragement.’ Keegan Hirst, the UN Goodwill Ambassador concluded, had both.
But how would the testosterone-charged arena in which Hirst earned a chunk of his living take the news, this supposedly parochial pastime suitable only for hulking great northern brutes? This sport for real men, among the toughest – if not the toughest – team games in the world? Would he now be seen as a threat? Or be called a ‘puff’, a pervert or, worst of all, soft?
Would this courage so admired by Hollywood celebrities make him the target of taunts from the terraces and opposition players? Maybe even his teammates? And what about the club who paid him?
After all, as the man himself had wondered aloud, ‘How could I be gay? I’m from Batley, for goodness sake. No one is gay in Batley.’
The answer wasn’t long in coming. Hirst and Batley were to play Heavy Woollen rivals Dewsbury that same afternoon. Not only that, they would wear pink rather than the usual cerise and fawn, part of a ‘Pink Weekend’ breast-cancer awareness campaign organized by Beverley Nicholas, wife of club chairman Kevin, with the one-off outfits later sold to the highest bidders. The purely coincidental timing, Keegan would recall, left him ‘absolutely mortified’ – a boon to picture desks the world over, cringe-worthy. The Bulldogs also lost the game – their second loss in that end-of-season battle for survival. Otherwise, the reaction to the morning press was everything he’d hoped.
On the one hand: ‘Well done’. And on the other: ‘So what?’
The decision to talk to the papers had not been easy to take, though much easier than opening up to Sara and, not long after that, the teammates he went to war alongside every weekend. Hirst came out to his wife one Thursday, after training, and having done so his thoughts turned to his friends. Not unreasonably, he chose the three he was and remains particularly close to – James Brown, Alex Rowe and Joe Chandler, raw-boned rugby league forwards all.
How could he approach it, though? He tossed the possibilities over in his mind. ‘Should I pull them over in training? Do I go round their houses? Do I get them to come to mine, go for a beer or whatever?’ In the end, he settled on the latter. On Sundays, he, Rowey and Brownie always went for a drink at Priestley’s Café-Bar in Birstall. Only on this particular occasion, Brownie wasn’t there, so Keegs texted Chandler instead. ‘I need to talk to you about something. Can we go for a coffee through the week?’
‘It’s all right,’ said Joe, not working the next day. ‘I’ll come down.’
A few beers later, the trio ordered a pizza apiece and set off back to Keegan’s. He’d just bought a new place, ‘so it was like “come and have a look” or whatever’. Digging deep with Dutch courage, he thought, ‘Fuck it, I’m telling them.’
Weeks afterwards, interviewed on ITV regional news show Calendar by the mate they’d shared a changing room and gym with for years, Rowey and Chandler sit like two rabbits in the headlights, recalling their reaction. ‘To be honest,’ Chandler tells his interrogator, ‘I was happy. I felt good that you viewed us as good enough friends to tell us. It meant a lot to me, being the person you came out to.’ But had he suspected anything, Keegan wants to know, his growl as deep and rough-hewn as Gaping Gill. ‘I had a little bit of an inkling, if truth be known …’ Chandler admits.
‘How?’ Keegan asks. ‘Was it the hot pants?’
With these two aware, the rest of the team remained to be told, not that there would be any grand announcement. Keegs had said to tell whom they liked when they liked; little in rugby league stays secret long anyway. One by one the lads approached the big man to assure him it was fine, before enjoying a right good night out.
That was how the coaches heard. It was how the board heard too and also the Batley chairman Kevin Nicholas, who got in touch to tell the skipper that he had the club’s absolute backing: ‘Whatever you want to do …’ And what he most wanted to do was get back to playing rugby.
Hirst had been in particularly towering form during that first comingout encounter with Dewsbury. Yet despite the Bulldogs holding a 12–6 half-time lead, it was a game that finished 28–22 in the Rams’ favour. At full-back, Johnny Campbell broke a leg – one of the worst injuries Batley’s head coach John Kear had seen.
Five weeks later, in the season finale, the applause as Hirst is replaced after a full-blooded opening half hour against Hunslet speaks volumes. All that paper talk, the sniffing about of tabloid hacks, the sensation – it already seems such a long time ago. Nor has England’s first openly gay rugby league player experienced any prejudice or abuse, home or away. Even the trip to Featherstone, a town Hirst has little affection for since he withstood an unhappy twenty-match endurance test there in 2014, passed without personal grief. If he would get stick anywhere, he thought, off players or fans, it would be at Fev: ‘Although Ainy did take the pressure off by kicking that ball, didn’t he?’
Having driven along Heritage Road past what’s left of the Batley Taverners’ social club, gutted in an overnight blaze a fortnight since, spectators are ushered towards the match-day car park, a scrap of land that doubles as a training paddock if all else is unavailable. ‘Nah,’ says an elderly attendant in a Hi-Vis jacket and flashing a toothless grin, he doesn’t expect it will be busy. Once inside the stadium, the eye cannot fail to be caught by a dramatically sloping field. Corner to corner, over a diagonal easterly incline, it drops not far short of ten feet; at least forty minutes of every match is an uphill battle.
Along with three covered grandstands, the remaining vantage points are concrete terracing and walkways, rarely full, more often than not providing plenty of room in which to sprawl or huddle, depending upon prevailing climatic conditions. Today, the Met Office has predicted sunshine, though it never materializes and a chill breeze stiffens.
Two of those grandstands run parallel with each touchline, though neither for the entire length. The main Glen Tomlinson Stand is positioned to the right. The Kirkwood Hospice Community Stand – on the site of the fabled ‘Long Stand’ and soon to be renamed K2 – runs part way down the left, the area further along nowadays empty and littered with rubble.
At the bottom end, behind the posts and against a semi-rural backdrop of hills and houses across the valley, sits the Craig Lingard Terrace, twelve steps high, though with no sign to that effect. It blew away on a particularly windy day in the direction of Hanging Heaton.
The ground’s largest edifice is a terraced Family Stand at the top of the ground, crush barriers and all. It is here that the followers of comparatively well-supported rivals like Featherstone, Bradford and Dewsbury – Hunslet no longer one of those – tend to congregate and make most noise. On its outside, it has a utilitarian feel, fronting a row of what might be taken for executive box windows but aren’t; no one is allowed to get too far up him or herself here. Inside, along with much else, the building to which it is adjoined houses changing rooms and the players’ tunnel – more accurately a corridor – that emerges beneath an advertisement for cider-brewing Championship sponsors Kingstone Press: ‘Batley Bulldogs – Rugby to the Core’.
Nor is the Glen Tomlinson Stand devoid of extra-curricular activity. In the square at its rear, around which bottle bars, lounges and toilet blocks are positioned, a sign reads ‘No Ball Games’. When the weather is kind, folk sit, chat and drink at tables here, beer-garden style, both sets of supporters mingling freely. Come half-time, they will do so again, in an atmosphere subdued but amiable. Among their number is a gang of teenage girls wearing Batley tops who, it transpires, are about to embark on a pioneering tour to Australia.
Before kick-off, pre-match entertainment. Former Eurovision Song Contest entrant Lindsay Dracass has driven all the way up from Sheffield to sing lustily on the back of a trailer. In 2001, in Copenhagen, the then fifteen-year-old Lindsay finished fifteenth out of twenty-three, earning twenty-eight points for the UK as against the 198 gathered by victors, Estonia. Her song ‘No Dream Impossible’ got to number thirty-two in the singles chart, the dawn of a glittering future. ‘They could have Frank Sinatra up there and no one would notice,’ sighs one sympathetic onlooker.
A seat in the stand itself offers an elevated view of a pitch in fine condition, given the time of year. ‘It’s better than my lawn, is that,’ says one old boy, who claims to have played centre here in the early 1950s. To the left is the Roy Powell Terrace, upon which a small but rowdy away contingent is gathered, the Ron Earnshaw Terrace to the right. This latter looks over the notorious dipped end of the pitch known locally and colloquially as the ‘nine ’oil’. And rising high above it all is the ground’s single futuristic touch. Above the ‘Doghouse’ – Batley’s club shop – turns a wobbly white wind turbine like some long-legged creation of H. G. Wells, sent on a mission from Mars.
This is the second oldest venue in professional rugby league, versions of rugby football having been played here since 1880. In fact, it is one of only four existing domestic venues to boast the distinction of having been there from the birth of what was initially the Northern Union in 1895, the other sites belonging to Leeds, Widnes and Wakefield, that latter the oldest, though all of those currently host Super League.
While few in number, Hunslet’s fans are in excellent voice; they chant, We hate Rhinos on a loop. Their coach, too, isn’t popular. Barry Eaton, when not at the Hawks an assistant at Leeds, has fielded over forty players under a controversial dual-registration agreement with Headingley, wherein anyone not playing for the Rhinos can have a run-out at Hunslet instead, judged fatal to team spirit and an affront to independence. He cops an earful en route to the dugout, his face a picture of disdain. Soon, relegation will confirm his departure, yet in just a few days he will celebrate an historic treble with Leeds at Old Trafford, the sort of scenario that might bring a sport into disrepute.
The home supporters are more reticent. There is little singing or agitation from them because there is nothing to get over-heated about. Scrum-half Scott Leatherbarrow’s tenth-minute opener and Hirst’s impressive stint puts the Bulldogs 20–0 up at the break; they are in complete control, destiny secure. A try from winger Wayne Reittie three minutes into the second half confirms that superiority and sparks another rendition from the Hunslet Hawks songbook.
Que sera, sera … whatever will be, will be … we’re going to Coventry …
The only drama on the field in a game that finishes 60–12 goes unnoticed by most spectators. Forward Adam ‘Gleds’ Gledhill scores his first try of the season in its very last game, thereby avoiding a traditional naked run. A brief flutter of drama off it comes when the visitors on the Roy Powell Terrace release a couple of bright-green flares. The Bernabéu this isn’t, though smoke does linger a while on the pitch.
As the hooter sounds, that smoke has long since dispersed and children race on to the field, several belonging to players headed in the opposite direction, coming to hug and acknowledge friends and relations in the Glen Tomlinson Stand. After which the weary soldiers turn and trudge back to the tunnel, where more applause awaits, John Kear sharing words with one Hunslet player in particular. His name is Danny Maun and as of this moment he is officially retired. A centre of distinction, not least with Batley, with whom he began and perhaps should have finished his first-team career after representing his hometown club in 254 games, his 34-year-old skeleton, muscle and brain have finally told him enough is enough.
‘Congratulations, kid,’ says Kear, patting him warmly on the back. ‘You’ve done yourself and your family proud.’
Within twenty-four hours, one player was already on his way out of Batley: scrum-half Leatherbarrow, bound for London Broncos on a two-year contract. And on BBC Radio Leeds, Kear was forced to deny that his own tenure was under threat. ‘The call before the game was about professional pride and finishing the season on a positive,’ he told reporter Terry Crook, an ex-Batley player and coach himself. ‘What we wanted to do was put on a bit of a show. We didn’t want to be in this division on points difference, we wanted to be here by right. We are a bit disappointed we didn’t get in the top four, as we felt we could have given the play-offs a shake-up.’
Since 15 February against Workington, his players had played every weekend but one. ‘That’s from lads who go to work and train on an evening. You’ve got to applaud them for that.’
Crook asked about recruitment for 2016. ‘It’s gone very well,’ said Kear. ‘When the fans get to see who we have brought in, they’ll be very excited indeed. I’m excited and I think the board of directors are excited. I wouldn’t know what to do if I wasn’t coaching. It’s just great fun, isn’t it? I’m privileged to be part of this game and while ever I’m enthusiastic, I’ll want to stay in it.’
KEVIN NICHOLAS HAS his hands full. It is the evening of Friday, 13 November – lucky for some – and he and chief executive Paul Harrison are hosting a supporters’ do.
Outside is darkness. It is a filthy night befitting a deep north of England winter. The road along the front of the stadium is lined with cars, engines purring, headlights glinting in the gloom. The drivers file their nails, check phones or listen to the radio, waiting to collect their children from soccer training nearby. A little further on, past the entrance to co-residents Batley Boys – or ‘Young Peoples Club: Batley Boys, Girls, Ladies ARLFC’ as it says above the door – are the large iron gates that give access to the square behind the Glen Tomlinson Stand, turnstiles nearby. Match-day admission: £17 adults, £12 concessions, juniors £3. Aside from the windmill creaking and whistling its interstellar signals on high, all is silence, the pitch beyond a nocturne in black and grey.
The venue for the supporters’ night, Ron’s Lounge, is reached via the front door – players and officials only on match-days – then along the corridor that doubles as the tunnel, past a handful of subterranean changing and treatment rooms and up two flights of claret-carpeted stairs to a brightly lit and utilitarian anteroom, or boardroom as it is grandly known. This is the hub of the club, its nerve centre, in which is found an assortment of chairs and circular tables, two small administrative offices and a kitchen. At one end, a large window extends from ceiling to floor, sentinel over the tunnel entrance below. At the other, a trophy cabinet is mounted on a wall.
Pride of place within the cabinet goes to the Champion of Champions Cup, won in 2011 for beating Halifax in a best versus best clash pioneered by the two clubs – Batley having won the 2010 Northern Rail Cup and their opponents that year’s Championship Grand Final. ‘We hoped it would be played for every year,’ says John Miller, a third director. ‘But no one else could be bothered, so we kept it.’
Otherwise, it contains little but framed photos, souvenir plates and salvers and old newspaper clippings, a porcelain bulldog crouched on top. Since winning the Challenge Cup three times prior to 1901 – including the very first in 1897 – there hasn’t been much to polish. Alongside, three steps to Ron’s Lounge. Just about every journey in these parts, large or small, involves a climb of some sort.
The predominant ‘claret and cream’ colour scheme is more accurately rouge cerise and desert fawn, a couple of variants on the club’s traditional colours that, if rendered literally, would curse the place with bright-pink woodwork and yellow-tan walls.
Winter nights such as these are when rugby league used to be played. The game considers itself a summer sport now, if kicking off in February and concluding in November can truly qualify as such.
Behind a polygon of gold light at the top end of the field, chairman Kev, smartly turned out in black trousers and salmon shirt, reckons he will give it fifteen minutes. ‘It’s not a nice night,’ he says, pint in hand. ‘You wouldn’t put a dog out, would you?’
Down to earth yet dapper, clipped moustache and reddish hair, this 56-year-old solicitor has the look of a light entertainer about him. A song and dance man, perhaps, but with the timing and material of a northern club comic. He bobs and weaves, handing out pieces of paper – last year’s results in groups of eight, highlighted red, yellow and green. ‘Nothing sinister.’ He has brought a box of season tickets that the evening is designed to sell.
CEO Harrison, the club’s only full-time employee, known to all as ‘Iro’ – no one including the man himself fully understanding why – has his name above an entrance that marks the 249 appearances and 82 tries amassed here after a debut in 1994. Brother of John Kear’s predecessor, former Great Britain international prop Karl Harrison, he joined from Hull, with whom he’d spent eight or so seasons before his decade at the Mount. His playing days long behind him, his right arm is in an elasticated sling. ‘Unstable wrist,’ he says, the diagnosis vocal gravel down a chute; golf injury no doubt. It won’t stop him pulling pints. The two remaining Batley directors, Paul Hull and Andy Winner, muck in also, not a millionaire benefactor in sight.
Of the five, Nicholas holds the majority share in the club, 80 per cent. Winner holds 10, the remainder spread ‘here and there’. The land on which the Fox’s Biscuits Stadium sits, along with the adjoining cricket field and bowling green, is held in trust and therefore essentially owned by Batley RLFC, who rent it for one pound a year on a 999-year lease. Given that was agreed around 1880, it isn’t running out soon.
But history, history is ubiquitous at Mount Pleasant. Every table, for example, has an engraved corner plaque, in memory of a contribution made. Next to the bar is a Great War Roll of Honour. Bygone days are clung on to here for dear life. Of the forty or fifty in tonight’s congregation, most are of middle age and upwards, many over sixty.
Once the evening gets underway, the chairman – everyone calls him ‘Kev’ – outlines his ambitions to raise the Bulldogs’ profile. A marketing team has been appointed, volunteers of course, and there are plans for the players – none present – to switch on the town’s Christmas lights, ‘although Cleckheaton have put a spanner in the works’. A new sound system is on its way, bartered down from £85,000 to a more appealing £7,000. ‘It was bigger than Wembley’s. They’d have heard it in Ossett.’ Other necessary improvements include CCTV, Wi-Fi in the press box and better floodlights, vital if the club is to comply with Rugby Football League (RFL) regulations, ‘if by some miracle we get into the middle eight’. Yet all of that needs brass. The lights alone will cost £30,000, a fair chunk of the £150,000 they are about to get from central coffers, a grant awarded on a sliding scale where teams highest up the table receive far more than those below them.
The club is trying to make season-ticket prices cheap and attractive but must be mindful of covering costs. A younger support base is needed, so Under-16s will gain free entry as long as they have a pass, price £2, that John Miller is ‘taking care of as we speak, if he can get the camera working’. One youngster already has his, beaming with pride as he slides it into the little wallet handed to him by his dad.
‘So,’ Kev computes, ‘fifteen games and the Blackpool Summer Bash costs £180, or £120 with concessions for students or over-sixties’ – i.e. the vast majority. Most regular supporters, it emerges, benefit from one concession or other. He welcomes Batley Girls back from their Australian tour, the first such ever completed, and notes that their coach, Craig Taylor, has been voted ‘Man of the Year’ by the Her Rugby League Association, whose objective is to ‘promote the game of rugby league by highlighting one of its greatest assets – its women’.
‘It was between Craig and Keegan,’ says Kev, adding that the girls won one game in four against a representative side selected from thirty Polynesian teams on the Sunshine Coast. ‘There aren’t thirty girls’ teams in this country,’ Taylor tells the assembly. At this point, Batley are the only British rugby league club to have a girls’ section officially incorporated.
It’s time for a break, during which Nicholas collects glasses and bottles before resuming his address. ‘Our aim is to win twenty and lose ten, the reverse of last year,’ he says. ‘But that’s a target, not a prediction.’ The audience is referred to the sheet of paper received earlier. The three groups signify wins (seven in the regular season, three in the Championship Shield), losses by twelve points and upwards (eight in the regular season and two in the Shield) and crucially – as Kev sees it – defeats by less than seven points (eight in the regular season, two in the Shield). In summary, eight extra on-field points – and sometimes as few as two – in those latter ten matches would have meant a less stressful time all round. It may have even got them into the middle eight. So with that in mind, players have been bought who constitute ‘a bit of a financial risk – though nothing that is going to endanger the well-being of the club’.
He puts a little more meat on the bones. The distribution of Championship money goes like this: the teams that were relegated into the competition from Super League ahead of 2015, Bradford and London, received £810,000 and £790,000 respectively. In 2016, that figure will drop to £700,000, the difference filtering a little further down the food chain, though £150,000 is still not £700,000, is it? Local rivals Dewsbury can thank a sixth-place finish for the extra £50,000 coming their way this term. Kev is not complaining about that: ‘It’s just the scenario we are in.’ From the off, the hand is stacked against them in terms of attracting the quality of player required.
Batley, though, have been lucky, he reveals. Sheffield, who were third and made the middle eight last year, will now join Bradford, Leigh and London in becoming full-time. The upshot being that three members of their squad – Dominic Brambani, Pat ‘Patch’ Walker and James Davey – each of whom have good jobs and no desire to relinquish their part-time status – have chosen to come here instead. For what it’s worth, Kev thinks the Eagles have made a mistake but is pleased to capture a trio of ‘very useful and experienced players’, particularly as it was in their positions that Batley were often found wanting last season.
The signings haven’t come about through great management, he admits, but recommendation. Prop Alex Rowe played a big part in selling the club, having once been at Sheffield himself. ‘A lot rests on them; we are putting our hope in them.’ To that end, an extra £30,000 has been spent, 20 per cent more than was spent on wages last season. The squad currently has twenty-three members, the majority familiar faces. A couple of centres, too, are on their way. One is a nineteen-year-old Leeds Beckett student, Zack McComb. The other is Chris Ulugia, a Samoan from Sydney via Bradford. That latter signing is particularly exciting, though his visa still needs approval from the RFL. He already has one to play with Bradford in 2016, but they don’t want him and a new employer has to apply again. He has to have played 75 per cent of the games he was eligible for to get one. ‘In many ways, he is our marquee signing.’
There is, though, another potential worry. Ulugia has just had an operation on a shoulder dislocated at the start of last season. ‘He came back too soon – daft or brave, I don’t know.’ He’s enthusiastic and disappointed he can’t stay full-time at Bradford, ‘a lad I’m sure will not give us any problems. He’s very quiet, but very tough.’
In every position, the chairman is confident they now have plenty of cover, again not the case before. ‘We are having a go at achieving something this year,’ he says, before admitting that there is a further financial nettle to be grasped. Given how, by Nicholas’s own calculation, £30,000 is the most the club can afford to run with, what if they do win more games? At this level, in a part-time environment, a player’s eventual income is based on win, lose or draw. There would be bonuses to pay.
Voila: the Bulldogs’ War Chest. Sponsoring the club for £5 a win and nothing for a loss will secure entry to Ron’s Lounge on match-day. Furthermore, if last year’s ten victories aren’t improved upon, the sponsor pays nothing, with his or her pledge written off. Win eleven games, the bill will be £55, and so on. The target membership is 250. Further benefits include a draw with a cash prize every home game, and before kick-off Ron’s Lounge is to be the exclusive preserve of War Chest members, where every pint is 50p cheaper, the stadium bars providing a principal source of income.
The club will again not field a reserve team – it can’t afford the £25,000–£30,000 it would take to run it. Kev hopes people are optimistic; he certainly is, but it’s time to stop talking now, because ‘a few of you old folk are falling asleep and you need to get some drinks in’.
After a wet and windy weekend, many of the same faces return for a shareholders’ AGM on Monday night, when the chairman sits in the middle of the room, accounts up to 31 October 2014 laid before him. The club had as expected made a loss, though ‘that isn’t always something to worry about,’ Kev says. In 2011, the figure was £14,000, in 2012, £33,000. In 2013, the loss was £25,000 and in the financial year under discussion, £31,000. However, with depreciation of the ground, capital gains tax, grants, cash flow and such, a more realistic figure would be £15,000, he thinks. Despite its careful husbandry, the club is on the losing side of the balance sheet annually and things are not getting any better, with dwindling attendances that contribute only about £60,000–70,000 to the business in any case a further concern.
Looking ahead to the accounts for the year just gone, the chairman expects that turnover will have risen given the income from the RFL, a big gate for the derby with Bradford and an unexpected electricity rebate from the company that supplies the energy- and cash-generating turbine and panels on this very roof; a mix-up meant Batley had been footing their bill. That one-off influx meant that the £15,000 debt could be paid off and for 2015 there had been less winning pay to find too. ‘We are not in any financial difficulty as we speak.’
There are two bank accounts – one for the bar and a main one for the club. The bar account currently contains £2,500. There is £8,500 in the main one. ‘We are keeping our head above water without being rich,’ Kev says. ‘As a company we are in a reasonable position – that’s why we are pushing the boat out a little. Without that payment, we wouldn’t have been able to afford it. Now we feel we can take a couple of risks without putting the club in jeopardy.’