International RL Blog

21 st  November 1959      Great Britain  11    v    Australia 10                          Leeds In 1959, the Kangaroos again thought they had won the elusive Ashes Trophy when Barry Muir scored a try under the posts but referee Gelder, to everybody’s amazement, ruled forward pass. They felt particularly aggrieved because they also hit a post and also questioned the validity of a  Great Britain  try. After the match, Kangaroos centre Harry Wells angrily confronted Gelder, and said: “You’re a thief and you cheated us” Gelder replied, “I’ve got to live here lad” Great Britain  went on to win the third and deciding test 18-12 to win the series

6 th  November 1948       Great Britain 17    Australia 6             Swinton Despite the baffling omission of their captain Len Smith, the Kangaroo tourists played their part in a great First Test matches as  Great Britain  won 23-21. Their form deserted them and they lost four games in a row before the Second Test at Station Road, Swinton.    Before the game, the players paid homage at the corner of the ground where Joe “Chimpy” Busch had been famously been denied in 1930 but they lost the match and The Ashes 17-6. Station Road, once again proved to be the graveyard of the Aussies as it hosted another British Ashes triumph. A 23-9 win for  Great Britain  at  Bradford  resulted in only the second ever whitewash in Ashes history. Sadly Station Road, Swinton is a now a housing estate.

Alan Prescott 5 th  July 1958      Australia    18 v Great Britain    25              Brisbane “We’d lost the first test and, whether the tour was a success or not depended on the second game. We got off to a shocking start losing Dave Bolton and Jim Challinor and Alan broke his arm. We didn’t know for certain it was broken but we guessed it was. He was asked to go to hospital at half time but refused because he reckoned he could still provide an obstacle for the Australians if he threw himself in front of them and he did just that. I don’t know how he   did it but he did. It was a double break from what I could gather afterwards and it finished his career really. Whether it was bravery or bloody madness, I couldn’t make my mind up at the time!  The third game was a question of doing it for Alan in his absence. We owed him something and came up with a big win.” ...

January 4 th  1930             The Lions 0 v Australia 0                        Swinton In 1930 at Swinton near Manchester, in the third and deciding  Test ,  Australia ’s half-back Joe “Chimpy” Busch picked the ball up at the scrum base and ran 20 m for what seemed like a match winning and Ashes winning score. Busch and his team were ecstatic but referee Bob Robinson over-turned his original decision to award the try after consulting the touch judge. Things didn’t improve for the Kangaroos when they were beaten 3-0 in 1933

1st January 1912            Northern Union    8    Australia  33           Birmingham The  1911-12 Kangaroo tour of Great Britain  was the second ever Kangaroo tour and was actually a tour by an Australasian team (it included four New Zealand players) rather than the Australian team alone. They became the first tourists to win the Ashes and the last to do so on British soil for over half a century. After 1922 the Great Britain RL team became known as  the Lions  which was many years before the RU team followed suit. In the same year they side beat Australia 6-0 at Salford to win back the Ashes. They would not be lost again until 1950. In 1928, the City Tattersalls Club in Sydney, Australia donated  The Ashes  trophy