Is there a place for Lancashire v Yorkshire in rugby league?

There always tends to be that loud collective groan every time the idea of breathing life into Lancashire’s traditional rivalry with Yorkshire is mooted.

The volume of that opposition means the Roses advocates need to sharpen up their arguments and back it up with a beefed-up marketing strategy if they are to ensure it is not another damp squib.

The fact that the current biggest champion for the Roses return is England’s head coach, rather than simply being driven by an administrator or broadcast partner, should put a different complexion on the debate.

And we do need to have a debate given the mid-season break – that every national coach says is a must - has been a thorny issue for more than a decade, with games against France occupying that spot this last two years.

Alas, despite plenty of pluck in their displays, the cross-channel clash is not seen as the competitive match for England it once was in the pre-Super League days and that does create a void in representative rugby league that the southern hemisphere does not have.

In fact the latter is going from strength to strength with the Pacific Championships being the sort of international event the northern hemisphere used to have when France and Wales were still a force.

There has been occasional experimentation with the opposition over the past 15 years with England having four games against the Exiles, made up of Super League’s overseas stars, between 2011-2013 and then for two years between 2021-22 against the Combined Nations All Stars were the foe.

It was a competitive fixture, with honours even across the six games which may have caused a few red faces.

The Exiles/CNAS never felt like a full international, and was prone to cry offs on both sides and the crowds quickly rumbled it, falling from the heights of the 14,000 at Headingley for the opener in 2011.

So, here we are – 12 months out from a first Ashes series since 2003 and two years away from a World Cup in Australia.

With that in mind a programme needs to be put in place to ensure that the cream of English rugby league talent is not only given an opportunity to rise to the top but to have its mettle tested, away from their club comfort zone, in the heat of the battle.

Wane’s motivation for a county clash comes from a different direction to mere wishful thinking that British rugby league’s big two traditional heartlands regions could ever create a showdown that matches the blood and thunder encounters between Queensland and New South Wales.

Those games have been a high point of the game Down Under since 1980 – and a bucket list event for many a sports fan.

English rugby league is a long way from that.

But as intriguing as the prospect of seeing Steve Prescott Man of Steel Mikey Lewis battle with Lancashire’s international halves Harry Smith and George Williams is, the concept must be developed and promoted beyond being purely a test trial match or else we will end up with something as dull as Probables v Possibles or Reds v Blues.

And this is where the marketing staff will have to earn their corn and put flesh on the bones of that idea, not least to push against the weight of negativity in a sport where club loyalties and rivalries are significantly stronger than an allegiance to a county that has been weakened year-on-year since local government re-organisation of 1974.

There was plenty of protest initially, but as the years roll by the numbers of us still putting Lancashire on letters diminishes (as has people writing letters for that matter) – and with it the affinity to the Red Rose county is on the wane.

You see the difference week-to-week. Whether you are at Cas, Wakey or Leeds, it does not take long before the “Yorkshire, Yorkshire” chants emerge whenever there is a heated exchange.

They are never met by "Lanky, Lanky, Lanky Lancashire" in response – such is the confused nature of our regional identity west of the Pennines. Maybe that is one of the main reasons that the feeling in Roses games never comes remotely near that of Origin Down Under.

Bizarrely, in rugby league land, if you take those boundaries at face value, then there’s no longer a single professional club in the shrunken county Lancashire.

Minnows Blackpool Borough were the only representatives, post re-organisation, but they have sadly long since bitten the dust.

Whether we like it or not, post 1974 St Helens was pushed into Merseyside, Wigan, Leigh, Rochdale, Salford, Swinton and Oldham moved to Greater Manchester, Barrow was whisked off to Cumbria and Widnes and Warrington were swallowed up by a Cheshire county encroaching north of the River Mersey.

That said, if you too hung up on that logic then Lancashire County Cricket Club’s Old Trafford base is also outside the modern boundaries, with Blackpool their only ‘home’ ground – and with Sedbergh fixtures opening a completely different can of worms.

The County Championship was always a feature of British rugby league – with a largely three-way contest between Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumberland/Cumbria being fixture on the calendar for decades between 1895 and 1982.

Of those Lancashire won 34 titles to Yorkshire’s 24 with Cumbria/Cumberland taking a commendable 16. Other counties joined in and the year after Runcorn topped the league table in 1900, Cheshire won the County Championship for the only time.

After the County Championship’s demise the game’s rulers had a couple of goes at trying to ratchet up some inter-county feeling – and in the 80s they pitched Alex Murphy and Peter Fox, the two biggest coaching characters from either side of the Pennines, against each other in the hope of stirring the pot.

They persisted with that between 1985-91, with Yorkshire winning all six. Seeing an ageing Mick Morgan bamboozle the cream of Lancashire’s test players at Central Park with a simple dummy and turn must have given the GB coach nightmares - as that was not in the Test trial script.

The War of the Roses never really took off, but under Super League the rebranded Origin was born with four games between 2001-2003 – again with limited spectator appeal.

(Image: SWpix.com)

But it did mean something to the players – well, some of them at least.

Steve Prescott’s last game of professional rugby league was Lancashire’s game against Yorkshire at Odsal in 2003 – a game in which he sustained the broken kneecap injury that led to the ending of his pro career.

In his autobiography – One in a Million – Steve explains his genuine pride in following in his dad Eric’s footsteps in winning a county cap.

Every level of junior rugby has representative honours at county level, so too does the Women’s game, so why not at elite Super League level?

Such a fixture would present someone like Morgan Knowles with a challenge. He would really need to be in the main showdown for Wane to get his wish about his best players ripping in.

And there is a loophole – after all Knowles was born in Ulverston, which before the 1974 boundary changes was, like Barrow, in Lancashire.

And there is a degree of licence – in his Carlisle days Kiwi test centre Dean Bell played for Cumbria against the touring Kangaroos in 1982, and several years later Greenwich-born Mark Calderwood played for Yorkshire in Origin.

Of course, rugby league exists beyond Yorkshire and Lancashire, so if this takes off then could we not make the weekend about the whole game.

The Cumbrians have always supported county rugby league – and they won two of the last three County Championships in the 1980s.

If a full day’s programme was put together Cumbria could be a big part of the event. Could a game against The South, given the talent that was evident at London Broncos last year, be a credible fixture?

That South representative side could also draw in players from Wales, plus the Midlands and Cornwall sides.

To complete a full day’s triple header – and to reach out further beyond Super League - then why not throw in a Lancashire A v Yorkshire A to allow players from Championship and League 1 to earn county honours.

Make a weekend of it, then throw in the Women’s Origin and the Academy Roses clash to bolster the whole marketable package.

It may sound like cloud cuckoo land but rugby league needs events, rather than simply additional loop fixtures.

And if done positively, rather than begrudgingly, then county rugby league for all its past failings and weak loyalties can have a place to offer something dynamic and different.