Rugby league: Catalans make history
On Saturday, “one of the greatest tales in rugby league history” was written at Wembley, said Mike Keegan in The Mail on Sunday. For the first time, the Challenge Cup – the sport’s oldest competition – was won by a team from outside England: Catalans Dragons, who hail from the French city of Perpignan. In a “brutal” final, the side overcame Warrington Wolves to win 20-14. What a “remarkable story”, said Chris Irvine in The Sunday Times. Only ten months ago, Catalans’ very existence was “under threat”: they were one loss away from relegation from the Super League, rugby league’s top division. And they made a terrible start to this season, winning only two of their first 11 matches. But they prevailed last weekend, thanks to a cast of heroes: Tony Gigot, the peerless French fullback, was “everywhere”; Josh Drinkwater, an Australian who was working on Sydney building sites until he joined Catalans in April, “kicked Warrington into submission”.
This is a watershed moment for French rugby league, said Jonathan Liew in The Independent. When rugby à treize arrived in France in the early 1930s, it was an instant success. By the start of the Second World War, it was growing at a pace “seen nowhere else in the world, before or since”. But the installation of the Vichy regime was disastrous for the game. The government, which had close ties to the rugby union establishment, outlawed the sport on the grounds that it was a “corrupter” of youth: its assets were seized, “its kits requisitioned”. When the ban was lifted, after the War, the sport had to “build itself up from nothing”. Yet it quickly bounced back, said Dave Woods on BBC Sport online. In 1951, when the national team returned from a tour of Australia, hundreds of thousands of people turned out for a parade. But from that zenith, French rugby league “masterminded its own nadir”. It was far too slow to embrace television, because administrators feared that fewer fans would pay to attend matches. The game slowly “drifted out of the national conscience”.
Today, there is little interest in rugby league, beyond the “strong pockets of working-class support” in Perpignan and Toulouse, said Kate Rowan in The Daily Telegraph. Media coverage is “a problem”. Still, this result is “a wonderful opportunity” for the sport, said Aaron Bower in The Guardian. It has been seeking to broaden its appeal beyond the strongholds of Yorkshire and the northwest. Next season, there could be as many as three non-english teams in the Super League: Toulouse and Toronto are in contention for promotion. Catalans’ win has proved that “teams outside the heartlands can succeed”. It may change “the entire image of the sport”.