By DAVE HADFIELD
I SHALL BE watching with great interest to see how football gets on with its War on Dissent.
The dominant code in this country recently announced that referees will no longer tolerate disgruntled players pursuing them around the pitch, eyes bulging, nostrils flaring and mouths foaming, every time a decision goes against them.
But Hark! Is that not the sound of stable doors being hurriedly and belatedly slammed? Surely this is a battle that was lost decades ago?
Give them anything they can argue about and footballers will. It sometimes seems to me that what passes for action on the pitch is merely a prelude to the main business, which is arguing about it.
The sad thing from our point of view is that we can no longer claim the moral high ground on this issue. The days when other sports used to envy the way rugby league players used to accept referees’ decisions stoically are long gone.
You can’t even blame the players exclusively. You can no longer tell them that, however long you rant at him, the referee is not going to change his decision.
Oh yes, he is. Or at least he is going to get someone else to do it for him. The award of a try, for instance, seems to require input from half the rugby league community. No wonder that it will soon be midnight before some games finish.
Both codes of rugby and football, for that matter, have had the tools to sort this out. They have all been able to use a rule which allows referees to advance a penalty by 10 metres if the whingers don’t put a sock in it.
Nobody does that anymore and I can’t for the life of me work out why. It was certainly effective; your own teammates would bind and gag you if you carried on.
Nor have we anything to boast about in the area of making contact with the officials. This is now just as prevalent among rugby league players as it is in football – although the odds admittedly change if Gareth Hock is out of
action for any reason.
We were discussing this among various other topics last week when I noticed that the rounders team were at the bar earlier than usual.
“Called off after one innings,” the first base person told me. “Umpire was being abused by the other side.”
We are not the only ones with these problems. There is no need, however, to resort to the lickspittle brown-nosing of the term ‘Sir’. In my latter years, I always found I could hit the right note with ‘Sonny’.
South West memories
I WAS IN the Cotswolds the other weekend, when I found a window of opportunity between matches.
Not exactly rugby league country, but there are plenty of connections which resonate for me. For one thing, I spent a year of my childhood in Cirencester and would no doubt finished up as a ruddy-checked West Country farmer if we hadn’t have got out of there smartly.
There is also the history of attempts to break into the sporting scene there. There’s a plaque in Cheltenham to commemorate the 1908 Test against the Kiwis and there was a time when there were plenty of West Countrymen in international teams.
And, long before Welshman ‘went North’ to play in Lancashire and Yorkshire and earn a crust, men of Gloucestershire were ‘going West’, where there was money to be made in Welsh rugby union.
As I sat in the little market town of Faringdon in the Vale of the White Horse, I reflected on the fact that I was roughly half-way between two professional(ish) rugby league clubs, the Gloucestershire All Golds and Oxford.
It also reminded me of a trip our fledgling Bolton team took to play the even more raw recruits of Cheltenham about 30 years ago.
We had to take our own referee, but alter some genius slammed his fingers in the mini-bus door he was in such pain that he passed out, right there in Hilton Park Services car-park.
We managed to revive him sufficiently to take charge of the match, but he gave us nothing.
It was also the match that produced one of those ‘awkward’ phone calls, with which I‘m sure we’re all familiar. Having broken the news to the family that I was still in Worcester on my way home from the match and would not be available for bedtime stories, I had some explaining to do.
“Where was this match?”
“Cheltenham.”
“Cheltenham? You said Chadderton'”
It was a mistake anyone could have made.
Signs point to Hull…
I WAS IN that neck of the woods again in order to complete the research for my next book, entitled ‘Lost in Spain’.
The Cotswolds? Spain? I can hear you objecting to my lack of any grasp of basic geography, but I did say I was lost. How much more lost do you want me to be?
Before flying to Spain to finalise work on a companion volume, ‘Lost in Gloucestershire’ – or Lostershire, as we natives call it – there is the small matter of the Challenge Cup final.
This year’s finalists have the advantage of a contrast in styles, which is often the pre-requisite of a good contest. A week before kick off, though, I find myself leaning towards Hull.
That is not a reaction to their last two games, where they scored 82 points and conceded none, because both Widnes and – particularly – the Catalans were dreadful. It’s more a case of Hull being slightly the more consistent side all season.
I believe that Lee Radford has a slightly clearer idea of his best line-up. There is also the issue of hunger for the trophy. There’s a rumour going around that Hull have never won at Wembley. If that is true, they might just have the edge in desire.
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