Wakefield Trinity Rugby League Results 1895 to Date

Looking at old newspaper cuttings from the early days of rugby is a fascinating thing. The first thing to look out for is that you're looking at Wakefield Trinity's results and not that of Wakefield. Secondly, it's a bit tricky getting your head around the scoring system - goals, tries, minor points (the latter I think being when the defending team dropped on the ball and similar to a safety in American Football. Also called touch-downs, dead balls and rouges) have all played a part in making the sport what it is today. And then there was something called posters, but I'm not sure what they were exactly...

I decided to go into work early for a few days and type up all of Wakefield's results from 1895. I couldn't have done it without the help of Ian Whiteley, who provided me with the results I was missing and also sent a number of spreadsheets through to help me double check and cross reference. I'm missing two points from season 1927/27  - I can't agree the individual results in total back to the records in 100 Years of Wakefield Trinity, which I've taken to be an  accurate source. Very odd. If anyone has the results for these matches and can pinpoint the discrepancy then please let me know. There's a Wakefield goal missing somewhere...

Also, if you have any Wakefield results pre 1895, please let me know and I'll add them on. The ones I've added are our matches against Leeds from 1890-95. They come from an excellent website about the legendary Goldthorpe brothers. What I really need is to spend some time going through newspaper reports of the time, but it's a bit tricky when I live down in London...

I really wanted to put the results in a wizzy webpage where you had dropdown menus and all that, but it was beyond me. So here's an Excel spreadsheet, the beauty of it being that it can be saved and added to and tweaked and made fancy. Just add a filter to look at each of our oppenents.

My next project will be to add player names...

A few notes:

• As the document is in Excel I didn't add the modern nicknames on to old teams - this makes it easier to look at all our results against them when you use the filter function in Excel...
• My humble opinion is that the name 'Wakefield Trinity' was good enough for 125 years and should be changed back as soon as possible to just that
• With a nickname of 'The Mighty Bongers', Tyldesley win the best team nickname award. Sadly they became the first club to move back to rugby union in 1911 
• Bradford is not Bradford Northern - it was the team that swapped to football and eventually became Bradford Park Avenue. As a result of this a breakaway faction went on to form Bradford Northern
• Manningham were the first ever champions of the Northern Rugby Football Union but swapped to football in 1907 and became Bradford City
• Castleford as we know and love them were founded in 1926. There was a different Castleford team in the league from 1896 to 1906 so I've kept their results separate
• That pesky Wigan team have been beaten 54 times, but we've lost 108 times to them, including a League Championship Final. At least we've beaten them twice at Wembley in 1946 and 1963 to win the  Challenge Cup...
• We may have also  beaten Huddersfield at Wembley, but they still feel like our bogey team. After a Yorkshire Cup Final victory against them in 1910 we lost 22 successive games, not beating them again until April 1924, 9-0 at Belle Vue. Indeed, our record in all competitions is won 90, lost  115 and drawn 7
• We've drawn a record 14 times against Hunslet, the first in 1898, the last in 1982
• Biggest win (new points scoring) is 90-12 v Highfield. Trinity won 78-9 against Batley in 1967 which would have been 96 points today. Furthermore,  the 17 tries and 11 goals scored in the 73-3 win in the 1949/50 Challenge Cup against Broughton Moor would be 90-4 in new money
• Other notable wins include 73-5 against Bradford Northern in 1961 (90-6 in today's points scoring), 71-0 v Leeds in 1945 (88-0 in modern money)
• We beat Batley 27 consecutive times at home from April 1953 until March 1986
• And even though we beat them 25 consecutive times at home between March 1940 and August 1965, we don't ever talk about THAT defeat away at Castleford...

 Here's Wakefield's records post-1895 (with a few earlier matches for which I have information)