Wakefield Trinity
One of the grand old men of world rugby, Wakefield Trinity was founded in January 1873, just two years after the formation of the Rugby Football Union, by the Young Mens Society of Trinity Church, a church organisation providing sports and social activities, with a little bit of spiritual fulfilment along the way .
Rugby had been gaining in popularity throughout the northern industrial towns, and the first ever rugby game in Wakefield took place on 11th December 1872, a match between Wakefield and Leeds Grammar School.
The first Trinity game took place on 8th February 1873 at Eastmoor, against the Wakefield club, with victory going to the Wakefield club.
The Trinity club played their earliest matches on Heath Common, with coats marking out the position of the goalposts, and then moved to fields near the Alexandra Hotel at Belle Vue. They kept their links with the Trinity Church by retaining the name and also by adopting the colours of the stained glass windows in the Trinity Church as the club colours, red and blue, still the club colours today.
Its roots in the church was the Trinity clubs greatest strength,as although many rugby clubs were springing up around Yorkshire and Lancashire, the reputation attached to a church side helped the club grow, and by the 1880's, Wakefield Trinity had become not only the main rugby side in Wakefield, but also one of the top clubs in Yorkshire, taking part in nine Yorkshire Cup finals between 1879 and 1891. The Yorkshire Post, in 1883, described Trinity as, "one of the strongest and most consistent teams in this or any other part of the United Kingdom."
Perhaps the seeds of rugby league were sown in comments like these, because the Trinity club, along with other clubs from the gritty north, began to triumph over the union heartland teams of the south, with Rowland Hill, the secretary of the English Rugby Union, declaring that, "the Trinity club was second to no other club in England," followed the season after by a comprehensive victory over Cambridge University, much to the surprise of the southern rugby world.
The move to the current Belle Vue ground took place in 1892, when the Trinity club leased a field adjacent to St Catherines School. However, as the Trinity club was still a church sports and social club at heart, they still wanted to host other sports there, and when the developed ground was officially opened in 1898, the ground included a sloping cycle track running round the perimeter of the pitch.
The main event in the history of Wakefield Trinity involved not just them, but also St Helens, Oldham, Halifax, Dewsbury, Leeds, Wigan, Bradford, Huddersfield, Hull, Hunslet, Widnes, Manningham, Broughton Rangers, Leigh, Warrington, Rochdale Hornets, Batley, Liversedge, Tyldesley and Brighouse. This event was, of course, the meeting at the George Hotel in Huddersfield on August 29th 1895, when representatives of those clubs agreed to form the Northern Union, and break away from the Rugby Football Union, in order to allow them to pay their players 'broken time' payments; ie, to pay them for the time they had to take off work in order to play. This Northern Union evolved to become the game of rugby league we know today.
Trinity won the Northern Union Challenge Cup, as it was then known, for the first time in 1909,
beating Hull 17-0 at Headingley. Although there was a return fixture in 1914, which Wakefield lost, they didn't get close to that prestigious piece of silver again until 1946. The pre-war appetite had to be sated by Yorkshire Cup Final appearances, all of them lost, even though the great Jonty Parkin turned out in the red and blue.
Things improved after the war, when Trinity won the first post-war final with a long range kick by the first Lance Todd Trophy winner, Billy Stott, beating Wigan 13-12.
The next trip to Wembley was in 1960, with most events in between being Yorkshire Cup and Yorkshire League victories. But they returned in style, beating Hull 38-5.
The 1960's was Wakefield's decade. There were further Challenge Cup victories in 1962 and 1963, along with Championship Final appearances in 1960 and 1962. Players of real greatness were turning out in the white with red and blue hoops, such as Derek Turner, Neil Fox and Harold Poynton. Wakefield won the Championship in 1967 and 1968, and booked their own place in history in the 1968 Watersplash Final, when torrential rain turned the pitch into a puddle and Don "poor lad" Fox missed the last-second conversion in front of the posts to give Leeds the cup.
The 1970's was a drive to stop a slide, with the club in a long decline from the success of the 1960's. Many seasons ended in relegation battles, and mid-table was the best the club could hope for.
There was a brief resurgence at the end of the 1970's, when raids into rugby union saw Mike Lampkowski, Keith Smith and Steve Diamond arrive at Belle Vue, along with the sporadic genius of Bill Ashurst, and they took the club on a trip to Wembley in 1979. Although it ended in defeat, any Wakefield fan of a certain age will remember the semi-final, with the last minute victory over St Helens and the great sporting sequence of "Topliss to Smith to Fletcher".
The eighties yo-yoed between divisions, although David Topliss returned as coach at the end of the eighties to take the club back into the top flight.
This didn't last long though, and Super League was born without Wakefield in its fold. This wasn't a bad thing, as there had been talks of a merger with Castleford and Featherstone within the rugby league hierarchy. The fans of all three clubs preferred the thought of a lower division than an artificial life as a new club, and the Wakefield club remained.
And the gamble paid off. A battling Division One Grand Final win in 1998 saw Trinity in the Super League, with a promise of a new stadium and a new name, the Wakefield Trinity Wildcats.
But it's tough at the top. More than a few seasons saw Trinity survive due only to the appalling performance of one of the other clubs, and often secured only in the last game. There was a moment of giddiness in 2004, when Trinity travelled to Wigan to play for a place in the Grand Final Elimination Play-off. The game was tight and tense, but Wigan took the spoils, just.
2006 will go down as an epic year, with survival being guaranteed only on the final day of the season. Again. Looking dead certainties for relegation, John Kear arrived at the club with only six games to go. He coached the players into a new team and a final day eliminator was set up against Castleford, the winner to stay up, the loser to go down. There was just enough juice left to give Wakefield victory, Castleford went down a division, and Wakefield survived one more time.
The future isn't good though, and maybe the relegation battle was only a short reprieve.
The Wakefield Metropolitan District Council beckoned the club aboard, spoke of grand plans for a sports village in Thornes Park, with Wakefield Trinity as the major tenants. The club bought the dream, as did the fans, but then just as the future looked rosy, the council decided it was impractical and expensive. The club is now left with a crumbling old ground and the risk of expulsion from Super League if something doesn't happen quickly. But times are hard for a traditional old rugby club, and there is no sugar daddy coming over the horizon, and so they may not survive another 135 years.