To date, it’s still not entirely clear why Coldplay are coming to Craven Park. There was a certain bemusement last month when one of the world’s biggest and most unashamedly commercial bands announced that they were complementing their London residency next summer with two nights at the modest 20,000-capacity Sewell Group Craven Park, home of Hull Kingston Rovers. These, along with six nights at Wembley, are the only European shows Coldplay will play next summer. Even the city council described the news as “absolutely bonkers”.
Why Hull? Well for one thing, this is a city with a rich musical heritage in its own right, from the Housemartins to Everything But The Girl to Mick Ronson. And according to Neil Hudgell in a recent interview with The Times, the message came through that Coldplay wanted to play somewhere “northern and gritty”: authentic, out of the way, a little bit quirky. Hudgell is the owner of Rovers, and the man responsible for securing what we now have to describe as the second-hottest ticket in town.
Because for the moment, there are more pressing matters to attend to. At noon on Saturday, a convoy of coaches will depart Craven Park and begin the long trek to Old Trafford, a journey of 100 miles that will also feel like a step over the frontier of history. Four years after finishing bottom of Super League, almost 40 years after their last major trophy, Hull KR are in the Grand Final for the first time. And the thesis here is that none of this really matters to anyone outside east Hull, which is why – paradoxically – it matters to everybody.
The rise of Hull KR in just a few short years is a triumph with many authors: players such as Mikey Lewis and Elliot Minchella, the workaholic Australian coach Willie Peters, the armies of staff and unpaid volunteers, the chairman and former ballboy Hudgell, who through relegation, promotion and pandemic has invested millions of his own money in a club long assumed to be in a kind of managed decline, a place with a rich past but very little apparent future.
And perhaps you didn’t hear much about this while it was happening. After all rugby league is not a big player in the sporting landscape of this country and Rovers – historically speaking – are not even the biggest club in Hull. But in the city from which the club still derives the vast majority of its fanbase – 60% of its fans live within walking distance of the stadium – the sense of growth has been apparent for a while.
Average attendances, bumbling around the 7,000-8,000 mark for most of the century, have rocketed to over 10,000 this season. Season-ticket sales are at an all-time high. And this is local, organic, word-of-mouth growth: a revolution built from the ground up, from the streets and neglected housing estates that form some of the most deprived wards in the region. Hudgell himself grew up on these streets, failing his A-levels before retraining as a lawyer. And though he has been urged many times to sell up, he understands the importance of sport in providing a sense of belonging, a pillar of community in precarious, atomising times.
In a couple of weeks IMG will issue its first official set of club gradings, upon which next season’s Super League and Championship status will be based. Despite finishing fourth and reaching the Challenge Cup final last season, Hull KR barely made the cut for automatic top-tier status in last year’s provisional assessment. Only 25% of the grade is tied to performance, with the rest defined by metrics such as profit, TV viewing figures, YouTube engagement and whether the stadium has LED advertising boards for television.
Community work, meanwhile, is assigned a meagre 5% weighting, based entirely on the annual turnover of the club foundation, with virtually no judgment or scrutiny of who that money is benefiting. If you spend £1m on a gigantic bowl of Haribo to put by the side of the M62, you get the full mark of 1.0. Meanwhile, if your corporate lounge does not meet the minimum capacity of 200, or the directors’ box is insufficiently perpendicular to the halfway line, you get a 1.0 deduction. Which gives you a pretty decent idea of IMG’s priorities.
Expansion is good. Investment is good. Spreading the gospel is good. But for a sport synonymous with its communities, more important by far is that it stays true to itself, serves the locality it represents, the oldest and most reliable investors of all. And the most sacred function of any sporting club is to nurture those roots, to provide the kind of belonging and value that can never be truly encapsulated in a stock market filing or grading card.
Rugby league is not a rich sport. It is not replete with investment banking sponsors or minor royals or the sort of people who will pay hundreds to see their sport upgraded to a gourmet dining experience. But it’s real. Wigan v Hull KR on Saturday night is not a made-for-TV confection, not a stop on the social scene, not a sportswashing exercise, but a real thing with a real bloodline that matters to actual people.
And I suppose the moral of the Hull KR story is that the local and the global, the ordinary and the extraordinary, need not be polar opposites. That the unglamorous work of building a base is not antithetical to aspiring for more. Victory for them on Saturday would be one of the sporting tales of the year. It would catapult them on to a wider stage, detonate the very logic of the sport itself, perhaps even light a path for the speculators and dreamers of the future. Why Hull? Well, why on earth not?
