Wars of the Roses

Rugby league's Magic Weekend came to Newcastle during the last 2 days in May. Here's an account of my experiences at SJP watching the 13 man code -:

If you read my blog about my Good Friday trip to Kingston Park for Newcastle Thunder versus Barrow Raiders (http://payaso-de-mierda.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/rolling-thunder-review.html), you’ll know I’m not an aficionado of rugby league by any stretch of the imagination, but I am a keen student of the 13 man code, partly because of my son Ben’s appetite for and experience of playing the game. He even wrote a rather fine article about the sport for The Popular Side #2 when it became public knowledge that Super League’s Magic Weekend 2015 would be held at St James’ Park. Consequently, when my very dear friend and Widnes fan Niall Mercer told me in The Tanners that he had a brace of free tickets for this event, I was more than grateful to take them off his hands, especially as Ben was arriving home the day before after successfully completing first year at university. Cheers Niall; very much appreciated!!

As I said in the previous RL blog, I enjoy the game, but don’t know huge amounts about it. Both times I’d been to see Thunder in the past they’d won, but I didn’t exactly find it to be riveting fare. For a game with a reputation of being fast paced, the victory over Barrow seemed very stop start. However, that was League 1 level rugby league; Super League is two divisions above that. What Magic Weekend showed me is that rugby league, like football, sees a marked step up in standards at the higher echelons of the game, to the extent that Wigan against Leeds was equivalent to watching Chelsea against Arsenal, or something of a similar ilk. Initially I’d compared it to Barcelona versus Real Madrid, but received wisdom tells me that the club game in the southern hemisphere is stratospherically better than our domestic product. However, more of Wigan later.

In a week where the sporting headlines were dominated by eventually successful attempts to replace Sepp Blatter as the whole corrupt FIFA edifice begins to totter alarmingly, accompanied by ever more vociferous calls to boycott the 2018 and 2022 World Cups in Russia and Qatar, on the basis of the squalid dictatorships than run those countries, the attendant human rights abuses and the shameful death toll of migrant workers, forced to toil in unsafe conditions to complete the stadia, it is instructive to note that the second tier rugby league Championship held their Magic Weekend the week previously at Bloomfield Road. You couldn’t make it up could you? Blackpool and then Newcastle United the week after; a game lining the pockets of the infernal trinity of Oyston, Ashley and Wonga. Still, at least Newcastle United had successfully maintained Premier League status the week before; not having been at the game, as I was on a Glaswegian odyssey, it was fitting that our seats for Magic Weekend were in the Gallowgate, where Jonas had scored that special clinching goal to assure our safety.

Heading up towards SJP from Haymarket, it was clear the bars were doing brisk business; whatever Old Orleans is called now was full of Leeds fans, The Hotspur was rammed and approximately 200 Wigan supporters were on the pavement outside The Trent singing lustily and getting it down their necks. Indeed serious drinking was the common factor amongst almost all the fans on the first day. In the ground, seats were allocated for certain stands, but on unreserved basis, with cursory attempts being made to keep people in their appropriate stand via the use of demotivated stewards and limp lines of police incident tape, though such fruitless measures were abandoned long before the second game had finished. We took a position in the Strawberry Corner, directly below the large screen used for video referrals and what we discovered was the stage where a competent but uninspired covers band would blast out limp versions of populist “classics” at half time in each game.

Seeing the ground metamorphosed on Magic Weekend was strange and almost unsettling; some things were very different, for a start the sets of posts, which showed a rugby league pitch is perhaps 20 yards shorter than a football one. Also, the preponderance of Lancashire accents surrounding me was a little weird. I’ve hardly any experience of the far side of the Pennines other than Manchester, so it was odd to hear such voices. Undoubtedly, rugby league is a working class sport; indeed it seems far more skewed towards attracting those from lower socio economic groupings than football does, possibly because of ticket prices I’d guess. The vast majority of the crowd were attired in a baffling array of replica shirts, ancient and modern, home and away, which were mainly beyond my ken. Without trying to sound like I drink in The Town Wall, the other items of attire sported by those in attendance, were of lower quality than you’d expect in a football ground. Rugby league does shabby rather than casual on the whole. They also do zany, as there were innumerable fancy dress outfits and t-shirts proclaiming Daz’s Stag Do and the like.

The strangest sight was the amount of drinking in the seats; with Kingstone Press cider a main Super League sponsor, empty bottles of that acidic pop and rakes of Carlsberg bottles, not to mention discarded 2 pint pots of Guinness and John Smith’s, as well as Pringles tubes, chip trays and burger wrappers, carpeted the stands to ankle height by the end of the day. I’d say a good three quarters of the crowd who were old enough to drink, were bladdered. It made Ben and my normal SJP routine of a litre bottle of Evian to share and a latte each at the interval seem very restrained.  Good job we got stuck into the pints in The Bodega afterwards then carried on imbibing at home. Gin and Fanta at 3am? Once a student I suppose….

The one familiar thing in the ground was seeing those in the the Gallowgate centre attired in black and white stripes, belting out “there’s only one Bobby Robson.” These were Widnes fans and, off the pitch, they were the heroes of the weekend. Having made the decision to produce a one-off kit in black and white stripes for the occasion, when a hooped version in the same colours is their traditional choice, they endeared themselves to the north east by donating all profits to the Sir Bobby Robson Foundation, whose name they emblazoned in the place of an advert on the front of the jersey.  Thus far, the SBR Foundation has benefitted by £20,000 and Widnes, previously only famous to me as the site of the famous Spike Island Festival I sold my ticket for back in 1990, will always have a place in the hearts of Tynesiders. It was fitting they absolutely pulverised Salford, owned by the kind of egotistical, arrogant dictator who’d be at home in the Premier League, by a score of 38-16 in the opening fixture of the weekend.

From where we were sat, it became apparent that certain clubs had been allocated tickets in various areas of the ground; Widnes and Hull KR in the Gallowgate and East Stands, Hull and Salford in the Leazes and Milburn, with Leeds and Wigan still in the pub at this point. Despite tickets being valid all day, many people were taking the chance to nip in and out, but I’d wager the fullest the ground was would have been during the Hull derby that was the middle game of day 1. This game presented a moral quandary for us; Hull play in black and white, but they were instrumental in removing Gateshead’s Super League licence back at the turn of the millennium. However, Hull KR play in red and white, though their fans were all around us. In the event I’m glad Hull won, as it’s not often the team in black and white thumps the team in red and white two games in a row at SJP. The final score was 46-20 to the bizarrely named Airlie Birds, who groundshare with Hull City, while Hull KR play at Craven Park.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this game was the amount of scrapping going on in the seats; ironically, in the East Stand where the only noises you hear on normal NUFC match days are Werther’s Originals being unwrapped or tartan blankets being unfolded over arthritic knees. As I say, with the idea of fans being allocated certain stands, this was not inter club aggression; this was pissed, frustrated Hull KR fans battling with each other. It was a proper pagga like; the kind that would get you a 5 year banning order if it had been football.  Clearly the stewards weren’t expecting this and simply couldn’t handle the situation, calling for the 3 or 4 coppers on duty, who’d no doubt been pleased to be rostered onto such a supposedly cushy number compared to policing the Quayside or Bigg Market, to intervene. It took the poliss a good couple of minutes to restore order and remove a couple of the talented amateur pugilists from the East Riding.

Now I’m not going to suggest this ought to have been front page news and reason enough for the forces of oppression to clamp down on rugby league fans, as it was fairly clear those involved were willing and indeed enthusiastic participants, but as I pointed out to Ben, it shows that as football fans, we are the most repressively legislated against sports fans in the country. While I know the real reason the media chose not to report on this, or any of the other clashes in the ground, was because it does not fit with the accepted and unchallenged narrative that rugby league is a safe, family orientated sport, which I’m sure it is normally, I’m glad they didn’t get all hysterical about it. To be honest I can understand where the Hull KR fans’ existential angst was coming from; this was a big local derby on the biggest weekend of the season; the chance for the annual away day piss up to somewhere different. Magic Weekend is the 27^th fixture of the season for rugby league clubs, rather similar to Scudamore’s discredited 39^th game suggestion for the Premier League, with the difference being this is a concept that is bought into passionately by the fans. Drunk, frustrated and miserable, the unsophisticated travellers from athwart the Humber responded in the only way they knew how; they ploated someone in the face for disagreeing with them. It isn’t right, but it seemed to help them work out the profound misery that gnawed at their souls. As I pointed out on the Sunday after seeing Bilel Mohsni go postal after Motherwell trounced the Huns, at least in rugby league they keep the violence off the pitch and restrict it to the stands.

So then, to the last game of the opening day; Leeds against Wigan and the one I was looking forward to. I know the lads from Mudhutter despise the egg chasers who share their ground, but I’m going to hold my hand up and say Wigan produced the most scintillating display of rugby league imaginable, both in terms of the inventiveness of their attacking play, but also their incredibly resolute defence that prevented Leeds from scoring a single point in the second half. The performance of full back Matty Bowen, both in defence and in attack, with a sparkling brace of tries, was almost breathtaking. To me, this was as good as Messi’s performance in the Copa del Rey, but what do I know? Well, I suspect the single point drop goal that Wigan grabbed with 2 minutes to go, sealing a 27-12 win, was the equivalent of taking the piss, such was the laughter it provoked. Certainly it had the sulking Leeds fans marching altogether out of the ground, windmilling each other as they went, though not to Hull KR levels. Indeed Leeds and Wigan fans mingled amiably in The Bodega afterwards.

Day two dawned to prolonged downpours, making handling the ball threacherous for players in the opening game of Huddersfield versus the Catalan Dragons. I’d naively assumed the Catalans to be from Barcelona, which seemed to be the case with the number of Catalan flags they were waving in a small knot of perhaps 200 fans in the Bar 1892 section closest to the Leazes. However, it appears they are French, from Perpignan, in the Pyrenees. Obviously I was supporting them, but this seemed a fond hope as Huddersfield cruised into a 16-0 lead at half time. Astonishingly though, the Catalans came back to lead 22-16 until the last seconds when Huddersfield touched down. The hooter went as the kicker lined up the conversion attempt on the touchline, meaning this was the final incident of the game; unerringly, he slotted the ball over for an invigorating 22-22 draw that came to life in the last twenty minutes.

The crowd was discernibly smaller on the second day; 27k compared to 41k on the Saturday. Not only that, but they were more abstemious as the chilly weather sent many scurrying for hot drinks rather than cold beers. The muted atmosphere was partly because of the empty seats and partly because we were in the Huddersfield and Castleford sections; the former were leaving and the latter hadn’t arrived as St Helens, rather splendidly sponsored by Typhoo Tea beat Warrington 20-16 in a game that was high on errors and low on skill. What should have been the second most anticipated game was something of a damp squib and, sadly, Ben and I decided to bail out after this one. Citing six tackle fatigue and lacking any real preference for either Castleford or Wakefield, we made our excuses and left. Typically enough, we missed the highest scoring game of the weekend as Castleford ran in 10 tries in trouncing rock-bottom Wakefield 56-16.

It appears that Magic Weekend at SJP was a huge success; fans, broadcasters and rugby league administrators are all very keen to come back again next year. Certainly, it was a symbiotically lucrative experience for all parties. Would I return? Yes I would, but probably only for 1 day. Despite the hideous cover versions band, the competitions to win selfie sticks and the general mintiness of many of the fans, I will concede that rugby league is a more than enticing sport and if I can’t find any Scottish Junior football on Saturday 13 June, I’ll head for Kingston Park to see Thunder take on Gloucester that day.