‘Stevo's Brain Is Missing!’

It’s just not cricket…is it?

Mon 10th Mar 2008
3:42pm
Alec Murky

Surely it’s high time we dropped the word ‘football’ from our game’s title and just called it ‘Rugby League’. Many outsiders can’t grasp why we use the ‘football’ term in our official name, and to be fair, it is confusing… We deserve to be proud and have our own name without any reference to another sport.‘Stevo’

That’d be the reference to an albeit rudimentary pastime, from which, it can be argued: rugby, gridiron, Gaelic football, Australian rules and (association) football—as we know it today—actually evolved from. Relinquishing a key part of our game’s history, regardless of whether it’s merely a word, is just wrong. It surprises me (well, it doesn’t actually) that ‘Stevo’—a devotee of the game’s heritage—would suggest such a measure.

In his column for Rugby Leaguer & League Express, ‘Stevo’ refers to the ARL—who dropped ‘football’ from their title soon after forming in 1908. Ah, these would be the same Australians who’ve actually never stopped refering to rugby league as football, ‘footy’. The antipodean press are actually worst perpetrators for dropping the word ‘rugby’ from rugby league—a word that rugby union shouldn’t have a monopoly on, but is slowly becoming somewhat of a trend. But I digress.

I’ll admit it: as a kid, I used to look at the fascia of The Willows’ and it’s deep red signage: ‘Salford Football Club’ it read, and I wondered why the words ‘rugby‘ and ‘league’ were missing. Salford didn’t play football, I thought. We played rugby; and rugby league at that. Now, subconciously or not, perhaps the inclusion of the term ‘football’ would later influence me to read a bit about the origins of rugby league. Regardless of what staunch soccer fans will have you believe, football is as intrinsic to their sport as it is to rugby. We must never forget it. If perplexing a number of young fans inspires them to read more about how our game began, then it can only be for the good. They’ll find out more about the schism; the raw, voliatile game of early Northern Union, how rugby league was as popular as soccer and how the portrayal of William Webb-Ellis is more fantasy than fact.

Stevo’s main point is to satisfy the confusion amongst ‘outsiders’. Some ‘outsiders’ don’t even realise there are two codes of rugby. Once, an old boss of mine actually questioned me on if there was any difference. After a brief, aghast moment, I began to think that maybe this view was likely to be prevelant. Some ‘outsiders’ are fuckwits, if they can’t be bothered spending a minute learning about about the difference between rugby league and rugby union, nevermind what the significance of ‘football’ is, our game shouldn’t make allowances for them. Many ‘outsiders’, however, probably don’t care about the difference between the codes, but do support their national teams. These are the people we need to support England in the Rugby League World Cup, just as they did in the Rugby [Union] World Cup. They don’t know, nor do they care, about why The RFL uses the term ‘football’.

All this, this reaction, due to the fact that ‘football’ is used in our ‘official name’. Surely then, for provoking the argument and raking up the past alone, ‘football’ must stay.