‘It was a disaster’: the tournament that made a mockery of Super League

Imagine sending Toulouse, Wakefield, Salford and Hull KR to Australia to play a series of games against Penrith, Melbourne, South Sydney and Parramatta. It would be madness, wouldn’t it? Well, that’s what happened 25 years ago this week, in what was described by Souths icon George Piggins as “one of the greatest farces ever perpetrated upon the Australian sporting public”. Harsh but probably true.

Ill-thought, illogical and elongated, the World Club Championship was a car crash of a tournament. But it is remembered with perverse enjoyment by many who were there to play, coach, report or watch it. In his new book Two Tribes, Steve Mascord recalls the event in 1997 with unashamed relish. He was reporting on the ‘Super League War’ every day for the Sydney Morning Herald and loved it. Now he has gone back to speak with 100 of the people involved.

Never slow to accept praise for successes, nor quick to acknowledge his failed ventures, the late Maurice Lindsay – Super League chairman at the time – admitted to Mascord: “We did a stupid thing”, but immediately added that it was “Nigel Wood’s fault”. Lindsay claimed he had arranged for the best three English clubs from Super League’s debut season – Wigan, St Helens and Bradford – to play Australia’s best three but “Wood got up and said ‘we all play, all 12 clubs, or nobody plays’. I said ‘Fucking hell – they’ll get destroyed.’” Lindsay was right. They did. “To cut a long story short, it was a disaster.”

Yes, but what a ludicrous disaster. With Visa putting up $1m for the winners and $500,000 for the runners-up, everyone started off keen. The bookies, however, knew what was going to happen: the four favourites were Australian teams; the five 1,000-1 outsiders were from Europe.