Donna Gee recently wrote an interesting article on Sportingo which praised the spectacle of two recent rugby finals - one Union, one League. She then went on to suggest that it would be a good idea for the two codes to amalgamate so that we could witness great contests between, say, the All Blacks (Union) and the Kangaroos (Australian national League side).

Poor Donna could not have known the furore her article was going to cause! Over 100 years of animosity between the two forms of rugby seemed to be condensed in the flood of letters which followed. Some were, in my opinion, very reasonable, but many were, on both sides, unreasonably unpleasant.

Now let me come clean right at the beginning. Yes, I am first and foremost a Rugby League fan, but I have watched both codes for most of my 50-odd years, as well as playing them, admittedly to a very low standard. If I try to extol the virtues of my favourite sport, I insist I am not trying to be provocative, and to illustrate this let me make a confession. I too resented the negative way our game was presented by certain areas of the media, so that when Rugby Union finally had the sense to go professional (as had tennis in the ‘60s), I rubbed my hands with glee at the prospect of cross-code competitions.

At last everyone would see the difference in standards between the professional and amateur games, which they duly did in May 1996. Wigan won comfortably the first match (under League rules against Bath) and also gate-crashed and won the Middlesex Sevens. Believing my own propaganda, I put £50 on Wigan to win the return fixture (under Union rules), and I think most followers of Rugby Union can tell you what happened to my money. Bath’s game plan that day was masterminded, if I am not mistaken, by one Brian Ashton - England's newly-appointed head coach.


Why have I gone to this length with a personal anecdote? Well, the views which follow will be disagreed with by many Union fans, which is their right, but I stress that their author is an open-minded individual who has learnt from the odd mistake.

In those early days of professional Rugby Union, the mid-nineties, several commentators suggested that we would see a hybrid game of rugby some time in the future. Like so many of those who responded to Donna's article, I scoffed at this idea, but I am now not so sure. I now believe that this hybrid will grow naturally out of Union.

You only have to look at early archive of, say, Five Nations matches as recent as the early ‘90s to see how much like League the back play has become. Every home nation, including France, has employed an ex-League coach as ‘defensive co-ordinator’, as did Australia long before them. That over-favoured League tactic of kicking high to the corner is now also commonplace in union, and the habit of the three-quarter running in front of the pass to obstruct the defence, used to perfection by the last touring All Blacks and which so exasperates many Union journalists, has existed in League as a ‘second-man move’ for as long as I can remember.

Already Rugby Union is considering the problems brought about by the scrum. As sports science becomes more developed and players bigger and stronger, the front row is becoming a very dangerous place to be, so that many a Union diehard will be contemplating in horror the days when ‘uncontested’ scrums are the norm, or even worse, when they become like the League travesty of a scrum.

This is my greatest criticism at present of League, but it is easy to see where this situation has come from. Administrators became frustrated at the delays caused when six professionals were up to all sorts of arcane trickery in the front row, and now the ball is practically passed to the loose forward. Is Union going to follow this path?

It is quite fascinating the way these two still-quite-distinct codes evolved, for sociological and historical reasons, in the late 19th century, from one single game. I can see a natural evolution one day, perhaps this century, into a hybrid code, but I would risk a bet on which one of the present day codes it will more resemble!