Quote: The Chair Maker "Everything was very nieve then, in many respects vintage games remind me more of those matches seen now at half time between kids.
Made for a very open exciting game though.
Hope people appreciated the beauty(sic) of competitive scrums.
Some things to note were the inability of players to spin pass the ball.
The lack of defensive lines, people just ran in on the tackler. This made it relatively easy to draw a man and put a runner in space.
The lack of offensive moves, with people running angles off the ball, including i may add blocking runs. It was all off the cuff.
The complete absence of flat (eg forward) passing.
Hookers that could actually hook
The poor quality of the tactical kicking games. Pimblett was a master kicker of his day, but his drop out only went 30 metres. Big kickers these days hoof the ball 50+ metres.
Similarly at kickoffs the ball tended to get picked up between the goal line and 20 metre line. Players just didnt have the strength to kick the ball deep down to the goal line.
Up and unders were feable things with hardly any height compared to the towering hang time bombs of today.
The appalling standard of refereeing. Billy T missed loads of knock ons, messing around at the play the ball, high tackles, including grapple tackles, feeding at the scrum,foot up at the crum, players standing offside. etc etc.
Off the pitch i noted that Saints fans outnumbered Leeds. We brought 25k to 30k to Wembley, Leeds only 20k. This was per Eddie Waring.
Saints fans sang "You will never Walk alone. They also sang ST.HELENS in a manner more like "LIVERPOOL" used to chant.
The YARKSHIRE chant was only heard when Leeds took the lead, and sounded different than it does today.
Nice to see both teams with proper rugby shirts. The redvee of Saints was really striking to see.
Eddie also referred to the rugby as FOOTBALL a number of times, and talked about SOCCER being played at Wembley
This is something you dont hear now, as SOCCER has completely taken ownership of the word FOOTBALL in this country, while trying to deny the very old use of the term SOCCER for the game of Association football.'"
I absolutely agree with everything, bar the kicking - or at least the place kicking. I can't recall the name of the Leeds player who took the shots at goal, but when he had to convert from the touchline, he took the ball back almost 35 metres. Yes, it made the angle of the kick more manageable, but you have to really hoof the thing to pop it over from there!
