Sam Jackson reports as the Barbarians return to Durham University to celebrate an important anniversary on Saturday
THE Barbarians will be back at the home of one of their first ever fixtures next weekend in a return to the North East where so much of their early history was written.
The game, next Saturday, is against Durham University, a fixture to mark the 150th anniversary of the university’s rugby club. The game will be played at Hollow Drift, the very same ground in Durham where they played against Old Dunelmians in 1897.
The Old Dunelmians were the old boys’ team for Durham School and there is a neat link here because the scrum half for the Barbarians on Saturday is Micky Young, the former Newcastle Falcons scrum half, who is a Durham School alumni himself.
The Baa-Baas have an unbeaten record at Hollow Drift – at least they do if we can count a 1-0somewhat dated winning streak as that. Their game there was in 1897 and they won by a score of 18-5 with a team that included nine internationals. All records of that fixture seem to agree on the score, though there is some dispute over whether the fixture took place four days after Christmas or five.
The Barbarians’ early years were forged in the North East. In 1895, they played South Shields, who they beat 5-27, in a fixture where the referee complained afterwards of the rowdiness of the crowd behaviour and which the home side was obliged to apologise for afterwards.
The first-ever Barbarians game was also in the North East, against Hartlepool Rovers on Friarage Field in 1890. The Baabaas won that 9-4 against a team captained by Fred Alderson who would be appointed England captain the following year when he made his international debut. There is a portrait of Alderson hanging in the Allianz Stadium.
The two rugby grounds mentioned here – Hollow Drift and Friarage Field – are also both notable for the fact that, after over 125 years of history and social development, they are both still standing, both still staging rugby matches.
Friarage Field is now the home patch for Hartlepool Boys Brigade Old Boys. The piece of ground has another significant note in history in that it still bears record of the bombardment from three German cruisers who appeared in the bay in 1914. Due the fact that a local artillery unit returned fire, thus making it a two-way affair, this famous rugby field is also the only First World War battlefield in the UK.
“The first-ever Barbarians game was played in the North East in 1890”
So the Barbarians will feel very much at home in the North East next weekend. Young certainly will do. He has played at Hollow Drift before; he played his first game there when he was still at school representing West Hartlepool against Durham City. He also played county games there in a county team that happened to include Alex Tait, far right, who would later be his long-term team-mate at Newcastle Falcons and who is also in the Barbarians squad for the Durham University fixture.
The Barbarians squad has further local links as it includes Josh Matavesi, who spent three seasons with Falcons, and Will Welch, below left, who is also locally born and bred and spent his entire professional career at Falcons too.
Young, Tait and Welch are all officially retired though Tait is a coach at Blaydon and, at the end of the season when the club was struggling for numbers, he was forced to put his boots back on again. However, it is reasonable to assume that they will come close to the required levels of fitness given that, last year, they made up half of a six-man team (also including Mark Wilson, formerly of England and Newcastle) competing in Chamonix-to-Marseille foot race, a kind of extended relay where collectively they completed 450km in 37 and a half hours.
“Micky said he’d never do it again,” Tait reports, “but I said I would. We’re planning. There’s one in Las Vegas that’s very similar; that might be 2026, 2027. We haven’t decided.” Neither Young nor Tait has represented the Baa-Baas before. Both of them see this game as an ideal final fixture, particularly given the historical role that Hollow Drift has played in their careers.
“Being able to make this effectively my last competitive game realistically is quite fitting,” Young says. “I never played for the Baa-Baas. I actually played against them for England in a non-cap game. Always, as a youngster, you want to tick that box of playing for them because obviously you grow up watching all the fancy players and the exciting rugby that they do. But I never thought I would. And we’re really excited for it because we haven’t had that environment of a team or a rugby set-up for a long time.”
If history is anything to go by, the opposition should be pretty handy too. “They’ve always been a hell of a set-up,” Young says.
Indeed, Durham University has produced three England captains (Will Carling, Phil De Glanville and Peter Dixon) plus one World Cup-winner (Will Greenwood) – which is just another chapter in this fixture’s history.
International Rugby
Will Genia backs the Henry Pollock hype but feels England need to be more fluid
The best betting sites
