The captain, Alan Prescott of St Helens, played all but the first three minutes of the game with a broken arm.1985 Wigan-Hull Cup final: The most marvellous cup final in living memory. Hull fought back from having been 22-8 down just after half-time, but Wigan won 28-24 and have never looked back.The third Test between Great Britain and Australia, 9 July 1988: Great Britain’s first Test victory in Australia for 14 years, and the end of a 15-match winning run for the Australians.Black moments1888: Swinton’s Bob Seddon, captain of the touring side, dies in a drowning accident in Australia.1903: Manningham, the game’s first champions, convert to soccer as Bradford City FC.1909: The live marsupial mascot from which all subsequent Australian touring sides would derive their nickname passes away before the end of the first tour.1927: New Zealand undertake the most diastrous tour in history, a chaotic circuit of England and Wales punctuated with rows, fights and rebellions and registering a hefty deficit for the New Zealand League.1933-37: London Highfield, Acton & Willesden and Streatham & Mitcham, optimistic attempts to interest the London public in rugby league, fail to survive infancy.1947: Wakefield centre Frank Townsend fatally injured in a match at Featherstone; Halifax’s Hudson Irving dies from a heart attack while playing at Dewsbury.1949: Halifax’s David Craven dies after breaking his neck playing against Workington Town.1954: The Lions match against New South Wales is abandoned after 56 minutes when the referee leaves the field in disgust at the players’ persistent fighting.1994: Bonnie Tyler (left) leads the community singing at the Challenge Cup Final.Quote unquote”Regrets are now in vain in dealing with the football split.” Yorkshire Post, 9 September 1895.”The fact is that football clubs now equal such a large expenditure that substantial ‘gates’ are a necessity if a club is to pay its way.” Lancaster Guardian, 17 April 1897.”We are having nothing but rain, snow, sleet and cold… Brilliant stand-off and typically anti-Pom Australian captain, inspirational leader of the unbeaten sixteenth Kangaroos.Ellery Hanley of Bradford Northern, Wigan, Leeds and Great Britain. A magnificent athlete and both captain and coach for his country.Memorable matchesThe Rorke’s Drift Test, 4 July 1914 at the SCG: Northern Union, reduced to nine fit players by injuries, still defeated Australia 14-6.The “Battle of Brisbane”, the first Test, 18 June 1932: Australia beat GB 13-6 in “the fiercest test match of all time”.France v Australia, first Test, 1951. Scored his first 100 tries in only 68 matches, a record.Wally Lewis of Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, Wakefield Trinity and Australia.

Captain of the 1946 “Indomitable” tourists in Australia, and later the father of a dynasty of rugby league players.Brian Bevan of Warrington: a phenomenal, if unlikely, athlete, and a prodigious try-scorer, perhaps the deadliest winger in history. Holder of the all-time single-season try-scoring record: 80 in 1913-14.Jim Sullivan of Wigan, Wales and GB: an extraordinarily effective goal-kicker: 2,867 between 1921 and 1946, including 22 in one match for Wigan against Flimby & Fothergill. Also a Welsh baseball international.Gus Risman of Salford, Workington, Batley, Wales and England: a master tactician who played 873 matches in a 25-year career. In 1915, 1,269 points for, 286 points against.Swinton 1927-28: the last team to win “All Four Cups”. In fact, they won five, acquiring the Salford Royal Hospital Cup, a pre-season charity trophy.St George, probably the finest of all Australian club sides: 11 consecutive titles between 1955 and 1966.The Fifteenth Kangaroos, Australia’s unbeaten touring side of 1982, led by the manly Manly hooker, Max Krilich.Wigan 1983-95: 37 trophies in 12 years, and absolute dominance of the domestic game.Legendary playersAlbert ‘Rozzy” Rosenfeld (right), of Huddersfield and Australia: diminutive winger who toured England with the first Kangaroos in 1908, met a Huddersfield girl and stayed. First annual conference of the Rugby Football League held at Keswick.1929: First Wembley Challenge Cup Final: 41,600 fans sang “Abide With Me” before watching Wigan beat Dewsbury 13-2.5 May 1954: A crowd of 120,000 watched the Challenge Cup Final replay at Odsal Stadium, Bradford – by far the biggest attendance at any rugby match of either code anywhere in the world.17 December 1967: First professional Sunday matches.1971-72: First sponsors enter the game – brewers Joshua Tetley and cigarette brand John Player.1972-73: Six-tackle rule introduced; timekeeper’s hooter first heard.8 April 1995: Super League proposals accepted by club chairmen. Confusion ensues.18 August 1995: Last traditional winter season begins – with a Wigan win, as usual.Great teamsHunslet 1907-08: clean sweep of all four trophies – Challenge Cup, Championship, County championship, County Challenge Cup.Huddersfield 1909-15: “The team of all the Talents”, winners of two Challenge Cups, three Championships, four Yorkshire Cups and four Yorkshire League titles.

Victory would have the sponsors running to sign up and secure the future. The most likely outcome, though, is that the pros will stuff the amateurs and scare the money even further away.. As Pugh said: “I’ve little doubt that someone who is offered a big package will still go.”A trip to South Africa is hardly a solution. Payment to players, it seemed logical, would prevent them having to defect to rugby league. The tragedy of the present ill-health in Welsh rugby is that this argument no longer applies: pounds 20,000 is a tenth of what league tends to offer, a threatening fact since the rival code does at present have a number of the most talented Welsh youngsters in its sights.

One problem Wales face is a lack of stars, apart from Ieuan Evans that is – and he was stripped of the captaincy.” This was confirmed in April when Just Players, a company formed by the leading Welsh players to capitalise on their marketability, went into receivership. Playervision, the England team’s equivalent, has a six-figure annual turnover.The problem is not lost on Vernon Pugh, chairman of the WRU. “If rugby does follow a line where there is a commercial connection to playing success, then it is not good for our players,” he said. “They understand that if results don’t improve, then what they can expect to earn won’t improve by much.”What the Welsh can expect will be upwards of pounds 20,000. This is paltry next to, for instance, the England players’ expected payroll, but Pugh explains that this is down not only to poverty of results but also to the fact that Wales is the poorest of the four home unions and there is a shortage of big companies to finance a package.As the inevitability of professionalism has increased in recent years, Wales always appeared to be one of the most likely beneficiaries. Three days later their heavy-handed treatment by Geoff Evans, the team manager, was made to look more than a little insensitive when he was missing from training as he himself was on a two-week holiday. As the Welsh rugby press and senior administrators chimed in their objections, it soon became clear that Wales had stumbled into a situation where the embarrassment levels came close to matching those reached when the side last went to South Africa.It would take a brave historian to catalogue the Welsh catastrophies of the last decade, but the fact is that, given the changes to be made in the game, the pain will be felt far deeper every time the team or its administrators now shoot themselves in the foot.