|
|
Waterloo has been Merseyside's most consistently successful rugby club at national level since the end of the First World War, more than 90 years ago.
Waterloo players were ever-present in every Four, then Five Nations’ Championship between 1923 and 1960, and representative honours have continued to be won in all but one decade since then. There have been 45 internationals in all and four Waterloo players have captained club, county and country.
Even in the modern professional era, when the world's leading rugby nations pick their players only from elite squads, Waterloo has played its part, feeding players like Ben Kay, Will Greenwood, Kyran Bracken, Austin Healey and Paul Grayson through their premiership clubs to England’s Grand Slam and World Cup winning squads.
And the last World Cup, in 2007, saw two Waterloo players involved in the shape of Chad Erskine, the US Eagle’s scrum-half, and Ander Monro, Canada's No.10.
Add to this the club’s numerous ‘B’ and under-23 internationals and its uncapped Barbarians – Laurie Connor, Dave Carfoot and before them George Taylor, later to become a Brigadier General and win two DSOs during and after the Normandy landings – and it soon becomes clear why Waterloo has figured for so long as one of England's leading rugby clubs.
The club was founded in 1882 to ensure that the previous season’s Merchant Taylors School side could continue playing together. The school, a longstanding fixture and institution in Crosby, has been associated with Waterloo in one way or another ever since. Its most recent distinguished rugby alumnus is Ben Kay, who started playing for Waterloo in the minis at under-8 level, as indeed did Kyran Bracken.
The club took its name from Great Crosby’s seaside suburb of Waterloo, where its first permanent pitch was marked out in a field near the Liverpool-Southport commuter railway line. Later it moved nearer the Waterloo district centre, taking over Northern Cricket Club's ground when the latter relocated to the outskirts of Crosby.
It stayed decidedly amateur after the rugby schism of 1895, which created professional rugby league and, in the period up to the First World War, gradually made its name in northern and Lancashire rugby.
The Great War was a turning point. Waterloo's young men joined tens of thousands of their contemporaries and volunteered to fight. No fewer than 51 of them never returned. The scale of the loss to the club was immense; to honour the fallen the members decided to create a new ground at Blundellsands, on the edge of the countryside, in their memory.
All the work was done by members in Sunday work-parties converting part of a nine- hole golf course into what became one of the finest rugby pitches in the country – and Lancashire’s official county ground for big matches – with a second, training pitch next to it.
The facilities proved crucial in helping to attract good players from all over the North West England and within a few short years Waterloo had its first international player in Sammy McQueen, who was selected as Scotland's fly-half for all four home internationals in 1923.
Joe Periton followed, playing 21 times in England between 1924 and 1930 and captaining club, county and country to boot. The interwar period then saw Waterloo emerge as a major force in rugby, with its standing very similar to that of, say, Leicester or Wasps today.
Waterloo dominated rugby in Lancashire, often providing all but one of the county side and making perhaps the biggest single contribution to Lancashire's 50-year reign as the most consistently successful county side in English rugby.
Star players included Watcyn Thomas, the former captain of Wales who had moved north to teach at Cowley School in St Helens, and H.B.‘Bert’ Toft, later to become a famous rugby writer, but not before he had captained Waterloo, Lancashire, and England and won a reputation as the most technically competent hooker in the game.
The 1930s also saw the emergence of one of the outstanding centre partnerships in the history of rugby. It was between Roy Leyland and the legendary Jack Heaton, whose international career began in 1935 and ended in 1947. Running rugby was the only style they knew, though the national selectors were by and large too conservative to select them together at international level very often.
Waterloo's position as a rugby force was probably best recognised in 1939, when four players were selected for the Calcutta cup match - Heaton, Toft and Heaton's cousin and winger Dicky Guest for England and Allan Roy, at lock, for Scotland.
Heaton, almost inevitably, also captained club, county and country. His great skill was to inspire combination in the backs and the style and ethos of rugby much beloved by the Barbarians, a rugby institution in which Heaton was to play a decisive role, later as a committee man and president, throughout his life.
The Second World War, however, ended what many now see was a golden age for Waterloo. Once again the playing strength was decimated, with 58 killed in the conflict. But when a chastened Waterloo resumed after the war, Heaton was there to rally the players and lead the resumption of Waterloo's progress.
There were 15 new international caps up until 1960, the most outstanding among them almost certainly Alan ‘Ned’ Ashcroft, who played in the back row to England between 1956 and 1959 and won two Lions caps on the successful tour of Australia as the decade ended.
Dick Greenwood (England 1966-69) was the next giant of the game to emerge from Waterloo as captain of club, county and country. He also had a big influence on the development of rugby, pioneering squad training sessions at international level, although this did not go down altogether well with some at the game’s Twickenham HQ.
Greenwood went one farther than the three club-county-country Waterloo captains who preceded him; he became England coach for a while in the 1980s, though many in the current younger generation will see his more eye-catching legacy in the game as the world-class brilliance of his son Will in an England or the Lions jersey.
Waterloo's performances dipped in the 1960s but then came back strongly in the next two decades, with the team reaching the John Player cup final at Twickenham in 1977 and scoring some ground-shaking victories against star-studded opponents, most notably Pontypool, when the Welsh side was studded with Lions, and, in the club's centenary year, the Barbarians themselves.
The advent of professional rugby had an inevitable impact on a club operating in an area dominated by giants of the round-ball game. The professional game also destroyed county rugby – for so long Waterloo players’ stepping-stone to international honours. Other Lancashire clubs have suffered similarly and in the new era, a leaner structure is beginning to emerge at Waterloo’s level with the clubs of the English Premiership virtually divorced from the grass roots level of the game.
At Waterloo, succeeding generations have consistently tried to turn out teams to play the game at the very limit of the players' collective ability. In the professional era the aspiration is for Waterloo to play the game at the highest level and standard the club can afford.
The economic climate and the RFU's policy of ever-reducing subsidies to national level clubs will affect Waterloo and a score of other clubs in a similar position. But Waterloo is well placed to weather this through the generosity of its members and the strength and affection of its supporters.
The club is an institution in the game, on Merseyside, and in Lancashire. In 2009-10, it will commence its campaign in National League Two North, hopefully playing the ball-in-hand running rugby that Jack Heaton used so effectively to make Waterloo famous.
With the help and encouragement of the supporters and subscribers to mywaterloorugby.com, anything is possible.
|
|