The Sports Factor

The centenary of rugby league is prompting discussion around the country, and not just on the sidelines. This week The Sports Factor heads to Canberra where the National Museum of Australia held a special forum on the history of the code.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Mick O'Regan: Like many of the programs on Radio National, The Sports Factor is off to the museum.

In our case we're heading to the nation's capital and going to the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, where they recently held a discussion night to accompany their current travelling exhibition, League of Legends, which of course celebrates the centenary of Rugby League.

A game that's always stirred the passion of its fans.

Wendy Harmer: For me it's like watching a game of chess. I think I love watching all the set plays. I love seeing the team run down, I just find it exciting, and when you have someone who breaks away and goes belting for the try-line, nearly the length of the field, I think it's one of the most spectacular sights in sport.

Mick O'Regan: Broadcaster, author and diehard Manly Sea-Eagles fan, Wendy Harmer, summarising what millions of people, mainly north of the Murray, think about Rugby League.

Well recently a few of those fans gathered at the National Museum in Canberra to participate in a forum about the game's history, some of its great characters, and its future.

And this week on the show we'll hear some of that discussion.

It seems a good time to do it, given that once again Origin football is bringing dismay and delight to fans in Queensland and New South Wales.

[Excerpt of State of Origin commentary]

Mick O'Regan: A moment from the State of Origin clash in Sydney on Wednesday night, which thankfully for me, was only the first game of three.

The National Museum's exhibition is called League of Legends: 100 Years of Rugby League in Australia, and in just a moment, the game's most diligent historian, Sean Fagan, will provide a few details about the formative years of the code.

But if nothing else, rugby league has always been a game filled with colourful characters, and one of the speakers at the forum, sports journalist and writer Ian Heads, shared a few behind-the-scenes moments involving three of them: Harry Wells, John Brass and, to begin with, the legendary Johnny 'Chook' Raper.

Ian Heads: There's a familiar face there you'll recognise, John Raper, he was in great form the other night. He was inducted into the - became a life member of the Sydney Cricket Ground, which meant a lot to him. Marvellous honour, it puts him with Bradman and Benaud and so many famous people, but gives him carte blanche to the Sydney Cricket Ground, but he talked about he'd spent a lot of time in the bar downstairs, which he certainly had. It was his belief probably that it meant free beer, you know, you get free beer. During the test match yesterday he went down and tried it out and was severely rebuffed and they said 'We appreciate you have that, but Sir, you have to pay for your beer.' He's such a character and he shines Rugby League. He's one of those players - he'd still love to be playing if he could.

I think my favourite story with him is that the day he took his very understanding wife Carol back to England to re-live the Kangaroo tours that he'd been on. He wanted to take her back to the Troutbeck Hotel at Ilkley where the team, '63, a few teams stayed there in fact, just to show her what it was like. So they arrived at this grand Yorkshire pile on the corner and it was now a nursing home. So they went in, and John - he's pretty good on the chat, John, you know, and he'd just spoken to them at the front desk, and he said, 'I've , stayed here', and they were a little perplexed but they said, 'Oh by all means, have a look through'. So John took Carol through and showed her various rooms, 'This is where Billy Smith brought the sheep up here', and 'This is the room that So-and-so axed down the door', and all that stuff. So it was great. And he said goodbye to the staff and they headed off and spent an hour, so they drove a little further towards Ilkley. There on the next corner with a big sign was The Troutbeck Hotel. They'd been in the wrong place, Chook.

It's a very John Raper story that really.

John Brass who's sort of that link between Rugby Union, one of the players who crossed over very successfully and had great success with Easts. He was the victim of a bomb threat before the Grand Final of 1975. John quite wittily tells the story about when the team ran out into the field, how he suddenly noticed there was a lot of space around him - oh it was a death threat, it wasn't a bomb threat I'm sorry, it was a death threat, so there was a lot of space around him, and he figured well the other players might have been a bit worried that the threatener may have been a bad shot, so they gave him a wide berth. But Ron Coote told me something the other night. I never knew that the photograph for that match was not done in the traditional way because of the threat to Brass, they were photographed in some enclosed space, probably the dressing room I'm not quite sure and I haven't had a chance to have a look at the photo to check that. But a very good player, John Brass, lovely hands.

The reason I've got Harry Wells, and he was a great centre obviously, and one of my all-time favourite stories about Rugby League involves Harry. He's a very genial, lovely fellow, and if any of you have met him you'll know that. A couple of great interests in life: he loved his football certainly, but he loved birds more, he's been a big bird collector over the years and he's always had aviaries and still has them in fact. Parrots are, his particular fancy I've got to say. He told a story one day about the match down somewhere in this region, he may have played at Crookwell or somewhere, I'm not quite sure, I didn't track down the exact details.

Anyway it was a Grand Final, the match, apparently Harry was towards the end of his career but he was I think playing in the centres that day, and it was a very tight game, his team were behind near the end. The ball came out along the line and Harry made a half break as he could, a really strong powerful centre, passed to the winger, and the winger shot off down the touchline, a great roar from the crowd. But at the moment he passed the ball Harry heard a noise overhead, and he stopped on the half-run. He looked up, and there's a flock of gang-gang cockatoos flying over the ground.

Anyway the play carries on down the wing. The winger keeps going, a flurry of action in the corner, and the winger scores the try, and it's the winning try as it turned out. Great excitement, the crowd's up in the air as you can imagine. They're all looking for Harry to congratulate him, and they turn back and there's Harry on the half-way line looking at his beloved gang-gang cockatoos. He did love birds. He said once, 'I love my football, but I think I love birds more.'

And just very quickly on that, Norm Provan told a great story about Harry too, about when the State team used to go to Brisbane, Harry would inevitably go to the Queensland Brisbane markets on the day before the match when he inevitably purchase some cockatoos or parrots or galahs or something, so he'd now have these birds that he'd have to bring back to Sydney on the plane. Which is not the easiest thing to do. What they used to do was they'd smuggle the birds onto the plane and they'd have to be tucked under the seats, obviously, and the players were under instruction if and when the birds started to squark, the players had to kick up a fuss or start singing, or make a racket as a distraction so Harry could get his birds home.

So that's Harry Wells, a lovely, genial, great Rugby League man, Harry.

Mick O'Regan: Veteran Rugby League writer and analyst, Ian Heads, sharing some insights into the hidden world of Rugby League during a forum at the National Museum of Australia.

The key point of the travelling exhibition is to chart the evolution of the game and its critical break with Rugby Union. That rupture was finally made absolute when about half of the 1908 Wallabies side voted with their feet and joined the ranks of the breakaway league.

The man who has devoted himself to the task of teasing out the game's origins, is Sean Fagan, the author of two important books on the subject, one dealing with the split in Rugby and the other a biography of the game's first true superstar, Dally Messenger.

The first decade of the 20th century was a moment of transition in Australian sport. Increased leisure time and a growing audience for weekend entertainment meant all kinds of sporting possibilities were floated.

Sean Fagan: There was also suggestions that Rugby League should merge with Australian Rules in Melbourne to create a national football code. Now that just seems a crazy idea now, but the match reports and other newspaper articles talk about rugby league being a half-way house between Rugby League being a half-way house between Rugby Union and Australian Rules in terms of the way it was played.

The Held Law, the rule about when the referee calls 'Held', you've got to stop and play the ball, the way it was originally intended was closer to Australian Rules, the minute you were pinned and couldn't pass the ball, that's when you were held. At that point you had to drop the ball and it could be kicked in any direction with your foot. Which is very similar to Australian Rules.

Dally Messsenger in 1911 topped the point-scoring in Sydney, scored the same number of points that Dave McNamara the leading Victorian Rules footballer scored in Melbourne that same year. Both games were particularly similar. The only difference obviously was an off-side rule.

But those moves towards merging the codes were taken up seriously in 1908 in August in Melbourne. James Giltinan said that when he went to England he would take to the English Rugby League the idea that he could take the merged game and create a national and international aspect for football. It didn't quite work out that way, as I said, Giltinan ended up bankrupted. Came back in 1909, he'd been thrown out of power, Trumper and Hoyle went shortly afterwards. But again, it was the game on the field that got the League through. The tour of New Zealand, a Maori team to Sydney, in the space of one weekend, a Saturday and a Monday brought in 50,000 fans and their money to the New South Wales Rugby League. That extra money helped them reinforce in the 1908 Wallabies team, a confidence in the game to the point where half of them defected to Rugby League. A lot of them got up to 200-pounds each, which was a lot of money, but that would never have happened if the League wasn't starting to get back onto its feet.

With the Wallabies in the League in 1910, an English Rugby League team came to Sydney. Now the League had been kept off the Cricket Ground and kept off the Sports Ground, it wasn't allowed to use those grounds. The Rugby Union had leases on them. The Cricket Ground actually wanted to host those games, which meant that the League was still forced to use the old Sydney Showground. But at that point the League got 40,000 crowds trying to cram into that small ground with 20,000 people turning up to club games. So 1910 is really where the League started to take hold. And by 1911, the League found with the work of the SCG Trust a loophole in the New South Wales Rugby Union's lease agreement. The union had control of Saturdays and public holidays. If they were on a Monday there was a public holiday on a Thursday, to do with the Coronation of one of the kings I think. So they got that Thursday and they got to use it, put New South Wales versus New Zealand on, and 50,000 people turned up to watch the first Rugby League game on that ground.

Dally Messenger was the Rugby League player to walk onto the field, and as if to mark the fact that the war was over against Rugby Union, it had been won, he performed the same feat: he ran at the New Zealand fullback, and rather than going left or right, for some reason he hurdled over the top of him and landed in the Union goal.

Now the scene is a death-defying feat, and he just loved doing it, but it was actually a New Zealand footballer who tried it not too many years before Dally, who got flicked as he did it and went straight headfirst into the ground and broke his neck. Six weeks later he was dead.

So that was Messenger's style. He was very thrilling, people felt they had to go and watch a game that he played in because if you didn't go, you might miss something.

Rugby League really in the end it wasn't about payment to players, it wasn't about compensation, it was about producing a game that everyone wanted to enjoy the play and to watch, and for 100 years the game's delivered that.

Mick O'Regan: Historian Sean Fagan, the author of 'The Master: The Life and Times of Dally Messenger', and 'The Rugby Rebellion: The Divide of League and Union'.

The power of the sporting photograph is these days taken for granted a bit. Though if you look on the front pages of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian from Wednesday this week, it's obvious that a good league snap can still emblazon a broadsheet.

Perhaps you have a favourite photo, based not on the significance of the moment in the greater sense of sport, but simply because it means something to you. Personally.

Now for me, when I think of Rugby League, I think of the great State of Origin clashes in the late '80s and early '90s. And the picture that captures the fiery intensity of the competition is undoubtedly that one of Wally Lewis exchanging pleasantries with the firebrand New South Wales forward, Mark Geyer.

Geoff Armstrong was given the task of reviewing a century of photos for the National Museum's exhibition, despite his initial denial of skills in the area.

Geoff Armstrong: I'm not a photographer, I don't pretend to be, in fact I'd be probably one of the world's worst. But I did do a lot of the photo research for centenary history. I am also a fan, I am a very dedicated St George fan, and so consequently I've seen a hell of a lot of photographs over the years, and I'd like to think that I know the difference between a good and a bad photo, in the same way as I'm sure you all have your own individual opinions on what a good or a great photo is.

It is true I think that the most - I don't know if I've turned this off - the most famous photo is the Gladiator's photograph, and I should just quickly describe how the Gladiator's photo came about. It's a photo taken at the conclusion of the 1963 Grand Final. Saints won that game 8-3, it was a very controversial game, and as the two captains greeted each other at the end of the game on a very muddy Sydney Cricket Ground, a shaft of sunlight came down, it sounds a bit religious almost, but a shaft of sunlight came down on these two great players, and John O'Grady, the great photographer from The Sun-Herald managed at that exact moment to get that photograph. And it is just a wonderful photograph.

But a couple of bits of trivia about that photo: one is that Arthur Summons at that moment is saying to Norm Provan 'You were bloody lucky'. Because it is the Johnny King try that won the game is a very controversial one, and it does appear from oral history told by a few players who were involved, that Darcy Lawler the referee might have been shall we say, biased towards St George slightly that day.

And the other great irony is that the caption they put above that photograph was 'Who's that?' I mean ask any Rugby League fan today, they know exactly who that is, but in 1963 there was some conjecture. What I think this shows is that over time the value of a sporting photograph can increase dramatically and I think this is one of the great examples of that.

There's some great stories from 1908, I honestly wish that a photographer had been at the Balmain-Newtown game at Birchgrove in 1908 when Frank Cheadle, the great Newtown centre who died in World War I, he had a shot at a field goal and as he kicked the field goal the ball burst. The first person to realise it was his Newtown team-mate, Bert Andrews, who ran through, picked up the deflated ball and put it over for a try. And the referee awarded the try, there was nothing else he could do.

So at that point Bob Graves who was Balmain's great front-rower, he was the Balmain captain, he then went up to the referee and said 'OK, that's a try, I concede that, but he's got to take the conversion with the same ball.' But the referee said 'No you can take a new ball', but just to add a punchline to the story, the kick in goal from right in front was missed.

Which reminds me very, very quickly, I shouldn't tell too many stories, but another story I found when I was research the Easts history which I wrote with Ian [Heads] and David Middleton, it's a story from a Balmain-Easts game in 1931. In those days Saturday papers were published all day, there was a new edition being published on the hour, usually to contain the latest race results. But anyway, in the break between Reserve grade and First grade, there was a paper boy in Eastern Suburbs colours who was walking around and he's yelling out, 'Piaper, piaper, get your piaper! Terrible Balmain tragedy. Piaper, piaper'. So obviously the Balmain fans think, 'Well what's going on?' so they rushed up and everyone bought this paper and they're flicking through and there's nothing about any tragedy at Balmain. So one of them says to the paper boy, 'What's going on?' and he said, 'Have a look at the Stop Press', and in the Stop Press there was the Third grade score which was Easts 23, Balmain nil.

Mick O'Regan: Well at least it shows the entrepreneurial side of the game wasn't limited to on-field activities.

As he showed the Museum audience the images that captured the history and mood of Rugby League, Geoff Armstrong touched the nerve familiar to any fan, that some pictures evoke personal responses. What's important to you might simply be yet another photo of a big boofy bloke in football boots to somebody else.

Geoff Armstrong: I reckon if we were asked what was our most favourite photo, I think we'd all have different answers. I know the papers of today tend to want to have photographs of arty photos, and I don't mean Artie Beetson, I mean you know, Craig Golding and Tim Clayton from The Sydney Morning Herald who are both magnificent photographers but they take photos of arty moments, breast-strokers with the water coming off, when I reckon the great photos are famous moments or dramatic moments, I'm not sure I mean you'd have to help me, I didn't see the papers yesterday as yet, but I don't know if Greg Inglis' great moment, whether it made any of the newspapers. I did notice The Daily Telegraph's front page was a glorious photo of the Members' Stand, but so be it.

My favourite all-time photo, I know I'm biased, is a photo of Ted Goodwin, it's the photo that appeared on Page 1 of Rugby League Week in 1977 after the first drawn Grand Final. It was taken by another great photographer, John Elliott, and it's a photo - Ted had blood down his face and just for me it's my favourite because it reminds me of my favourite day in football sitting on the Hill with I think it was 69,000 fans. And it also takes me back to the first time I went to the football which was at Cumberland Oval in 1971 I remember my uncle took me to a Saints-Parra game and Ted dominated.

One thing I remember about that is my grandparents lived at Westmead and so to get to the ground we had to walk over Parramatta Park, and I remember seeing as we walked out of the ground, there was a kid there with a corner post - remember the old paper corner posts? - and he was the guy who'd won the dash for the corner post, and he sort of competed with Ted Goodwin to be my hero, and I thought one day I would like to get that corner post.

But it also reminds me of the day Ian Schubert head-butted Ted Goodwin in the '75 Grand Final and cost Saints the game, And it also reminds me of another moment, and this is a very personal moment which was at Wynyard Station in 1979. Ted Goodwin was the star player of the '77 season. He and Rod Reddy were the reason Saints won in '77. And then he had a horrible year in '78 and left St George at the end of '78 when he went to Newtown and had another terrible year at Newtown in '79. But Saints recovered to make the Grand Final in '79, and there was a very meagre promotion where the fans got to meet the players at Wynyard Station, and I as a St George supporter went to this and I can remember Craig Young on stage with his red St George shirt which had Albert, his nickname Albert, under the badge.

But the only autograph I got that day was after I walked out to next door was a building site, they were building a building right next door to Wynyard Station, say about 20 metres from where the St George First Grade Grand Final team was on stage, and Ted Goodwin was working as a labourer there, and I mean I had a five minute conversation, he wasn't bitter, that was just life, and of course Ted came back to have some good seasons with Wests after that. But it was just another Who's that? Moment, almost a Who's that? Ted Goodwin had been the star of the game in '77 two years later, he was a labourer on a worksite, and just again, it's that Who's that? moment.

Another Who's that? moment, which I know this photo Ian's going to have featured in his presentation, it was a photo that was taken, so it won't be up there now, it was a photo that was taken in 1932 during the Ashes series, but it's one of the wonderful photos from the State Library of New South Wales collection, but it's captioned Rugby League at Sydney Cricket Ground. And it actually appears in the centenary history as well, and it took a fair amount of research to work out what it was, and I'd just like to quickly take you through it. The first thing we did was work out that because the jumpers the England team was wearing, it had to be 1932.

Fortunately the England player had a black armband on, so we were then, by going through the game after game, clarified that there was only one game on the tour that the England team had worn the black armband on. And finally we were able to determine that luckily the photo actually appeared on the front page of The Referee, which is the sporting weekly, and so we were able to write a caption that then said that great Australian second-rower Joe Pearce competes with England centre, Stanley Brogden for the ball. It was the England v Metropolis game at the Sydney Cricket Ground, that was the caption.

But the reason I say all this is to demonstrate some of the work that goes into these historical books. It would have been easy just to put a caption 'Rugby League Test Match', it would have been wrong, it wasn't a Test match in 1932, but we went to the trouble of finding out exactly what was appearing in that game. And again, that meant that instead of Pearce and Brogden being unknown players, Who's that? we identified two great players in a really pivotal moment in an important game and just show how athletic these footballers were.

Another thing about that photo in the background of that photo is the crowds are huge, and I think it just shows just how big Rugby League, how entrenched Rugby League was by the '30s. Sean's [Fagan] alluded to that with the way the game grew, and I think between the wars club football really grew into being an important thing. And it really entrenched Rugby League in the Australian psyche, or at least in the New South Wales and Queensland psyche.

I mean to the point that I think Rugby League in the '30s was as iconic (if iconic's the right word) as Phar Lap, as Bradman, as the Bridge, as Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, and it was so entrenched in our psyche that not even Super League could beat it, and as we've seen today the game has just grown to, it tends to grow every year. I remember there was some quite silly talk in the papers during the lead-up to the Test in Sydney about crowd figures being down, I mean that was just silly. Crowds are actually up. Whether that means there are more people passionate about the game I'm not sure, but just in terms of faces through the gate, there's no doubt.

Mick O'Regan: Geoff Armstrong also noted that peculiar ability of some players to attract the lens. Not so much for their photogenic smiles as for their ability to be in the right place and the right time.

IN the early days of Rugby League in Sydney, Dally Messenger might have been the word on everyone's lips, but another player was constantly in the frame.

Geoff Armstrong: It's astonishing how many times in those photos Dave Brown appears. It's almost like - I know he wore headgear, that was his trademark and he stood out, but it was as if the photographers were drawn to him. I think it was of course he was that good a player. Brown was known as the Bradman of League, I think he scored 385 points on a Kangaroo tour. His records are mind-blowing, 45 points in a game, I think he scored 38 tries in one season. I'm not sure about that I might have to clarify that. But he was Easts captain at 19, he was Australian captain at 19, he was Australian captain at 22, he was just a great, great player.

Which brings me to a bit of a bugbear of mine which I'd like to just go off on a random thought. It concerns the team of the century and the process of selecting 100 greatest in the team of the century, which I was involved in. And thought that Brown didn't make it I feel that was a great shame. And I will get back to it though, because I'm not sure who I'd put out to put Brown in.

But talking about the 100 greatest, I just thought I'd explain just a couple of things. It's amazing how some players have over the years in history, been forgotten. And other players, their reputation has grown. A good example of that concerns Sean's mate, Dally Messenger, who in I think 1940 Sean? picked the best-ever team? But the team he picked was a team of guys he enjoyed playing with. No the guys he would most like to play with, so that every player in that team, he would either have played with or against, except for one, and the bloke he picked was a bloke called Harry Caples, who's an interesting story.

Caples was a five-eighth who came into Sydney football in about 1916, played for Easts, went on a Kangaroo tour in '21. By 1923 when Easts won the comp., he was probably the best player in the game. But then he went to Melbourne in 1924 to try with Harry Sunderland, the great administrator, to establish League in Melbourne, then went to Queensland in '25, was never quite the same player, and has been forgotten.

And I sort of compare that to a bloke like (and I don't like criticising players) but a bloke like Steve Roach, who was an outstanding front rower, but I think over the last 20 years his reputation has improved. If we think back to what Roach was as a footballer, I think he made the top of 100 greatest players easily, and I found that a bit surprising, whereas a bloke like Harry Caples I think he got three votes out of I think it was 70 people, 68 people voted. So it is interesting how those voting can change.

I was privy to the voting of the 100 greatest. I was also involved in the selection of the Team of the Century and it was interesting some of the biases that came about in those two teams. One really interesting process, I know the Australian Team of the Century was announced recently and the team was paraded before the Test on Friday. That Australian team includes ten players who played football in the '50s and '60s, and three guys Meninga, Lewis and Johns who I would describe as modern players. Queensland have also picked the Team of the Century, I think they picked it last year. They also include ten players from the '50s and '60s and three modern players. And I think that just says something about we always go back to the heroes of our youth.

When we've got a difficult decision between a modern player and a really old player and the guys from the '50s and '60s, and I think that bias was enough to sort of just modify what the eventual Team of the Century was and squeeze guys like Messenger who made the bench, and Frank Verge who made the bench and Brown who didn't even make the 17 squeeze them out. Again I'm cheating, because I'm not going to say who should have been left out to put these guys in, but I think it is a shame. And it was interesting because I know Ray Chesterton in The Daily Telegraph ran the line in the papers about a possible Queensland bias in the selections. I didn't see that but I did see that bias towards the '50s and '60s and yet, as Ted Goodwin's my favourite player, I think if we were all honest with ourselves, we'd probably look back to the '50s and '60s and '70s and think 'Yes, the players there are pretty good.'

And one other thing on the process of picking Teams of the Century and 100 Greatest, a great example of how this process is not definitive, and I don't think anyone is pretending that the Team of the Century is definitive, is the situation that's now occurred with the hookers. Noel Kelly was selected as the Team of the Century hooker. I think in 2005 maybe in 2004, the Rugby League had a promotion to pick the Team of the '60s and Noel Kelly could have been the hooker in that, but he wasn't. It was Ian Walsh. The Team of the '50s hooker which was the promotion done the year after, is Kevin Schubert and yet Kelly, Walsh and Schubert are not in the Rugby League Hall of Fame but Ken Carney is. So you've got this crazy situation where it just doesn't make sense in one sense but what it really does is just underline, well I was going to say undefinitive, that's not the right word, but how these processes, they just can't be perfect and no-one should pretend that they are.

But I just wanted to end with one final thought because I was going to say I wasn't going to suggest who should or who shouldn't be in the 100 Greatest or the Top Team, but there's one bloke that I reckon shouldn't be. It's Arthur Summons. I never saw Arthur Summons play, he's before my time, but you look at his record, he played 9 Test matches, which is not a lot. He never won a premiership. He was Captain-Coach of the '63 Kangaroos but he didn't play in that series because of injury and when I look at the fact that Barry Muir played halfback and Earl Harrison was established as the 5/8 that season, I'm just not sure where Summons would have fitted in in the '63 Kangaroos.

And yet since that photo was taken since the Gladiators was taken over the last 40 years, Arthur Summons' reputation has grown and grown and grown to the point that he made the 100 Greatest, no problem at all. And you know what? I don't think on playing ability he should have, but his status in the game purely from that photo, I reckon he's entitled to get in just for that. I just want to end with the thought that never ever can you underestimate the power of a great Rugby League photograph.

APPLAUSE

Mick O'Regan: Geoff Armstrong. And for details on the League of Legends Travelling Exhibition, go to the NMA's webpage: nma.gov.au and click on the exhibitions link on the front page.

Thanks to the team of Andrew Davies, Jim Ussher and Sabrina Lipovic.

Guests

Ian Heads
Rugby League writer & historian.

Sean Fagan
Rugby League writer & historian.

Geoff Armstrong
Journalist & author.

Further Information

League of Legends Exhibition

Presenter

Mick O'Regan

Producer

Andrew Davies