Over the past decade Tony Collins has established himself as the leading authority on rugby league in England. This text follows on from his first book, which focused on the emergence and codification of what we now know as rugby league (Tony Collins, Rugby's Great Split: Class, Culture, and the Origins of Rugby League Football [London: F. Cass, 1998]), to provide a comprehensive account of the development and positioning of the game in twentieth-century Britain. Meticulously researched, and with a keen eye for detail, Collins provides an informative and insightful account of a game often overlooked in studies of sport in England and Great Britain.

The text is divided into thirteen chapters, each of which deals with a particular period or theme. More than just a history of a sport, the book is a valuable source of information detailing issues of social class, place, the decline of traditional British industries, and the challenges to hegemonic notions of masculinity. As a social historian Collins uses a range of archival sources to (re)position the game and examines its location in relation to other sports and significant events of the period including the two World Wars and the miner strikes of the 1980s.

Collins explores rugby league as a social metaphor and quotes from a presentation by Terry Wynn in 1999: “Rugby league is more than a sport, for those in its heartland in the north of England it is a cultural identity, a passion, a way of life. Its history is one of determination to succeed against the establishment, to fight discrimination and intolerance and to be an honest sport” (188).

Class was the central issue in the inception and development of this particular sport (see esp. Collins, Rugby's Great Split), and the author critically interrogates the importance of class in the twentieth century within the context of the economic conditions of industrial and postindustrial capitalism. Alongside this, in recognition of its geographical positioning, the text is also an exploration of “northerness” and the specific social and cultural uniqueness of the game. As someone who was first taken to watch a rugby league match at the age of seven, Collins acknowledges his own locatedness in writing the text and recognizes that “much of what I learned about the adult world as a child was gleaned from the folklore and culture of rugby league” (xi). In the closing pages of the text the author argues that far from being a weakness, “rugby league's roots in the northern working class have been its strength and will continue to be so” (193).

One of my only criticisms of the text is its title. As the author explains, the game is played largely in a small area, and this restricted geography meant that it would “always be seen as the northern game and inevitably identified with the mines, mills and manufacturing industries of the region” (7). Although amateur rugby league sides exist in other parts of the country it is still very much a sport associated with a particular part of northern England. Collins does often refer to specific cases concerning high profile players who joined the paid ranks of the thirteen-man game from South Wales, but just as much attention is afforded to the many Antipodean players who moved to the North of England to play the game. In fact a whole chapter is devoted to “The Kangaroo connection” (chap. 8) and the development of the game in Australia. The final chapter provides a critical exploration of the (open) professionalization of rugby union and refers to the “inexorable growth in the media coverage and place in the national consciousness of rugby union” (193) in the period since 1995. The union game has established such a position in Wales for more than a century (see Dai Smith and Gareth Williams, Fields of Praise: The Official History of the Welsh Rugby Union, 1881–1981 [Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1980]). The chapter deals almost exclusively with rugby in England, and this would seem to be a more appropriate title for the book.

The text focuses mostly upon the game up until 1995. This was a significant year for the sport as it signed an £87 million deal with BSkyB and agreed to play Super League matches in the summer months. This was a seismic change for a game that had previously been played at a different time of the year for almost a century. There was much resistance to such major change, but most also recognized that the game needed the television revenues to survive. It would have been interesting to learn more about the magnitude of this change and how it affected those involved with the game, although I suspect that rugby league post-1995 will form the focus of another text in the near future.

Neither of these observations should detract from the fact that this is a most valuable text. Through utilizing a range of archival sources, Collins provides a lucid and detailed account of rugby league and the wider social, cultural, and political environment.