This sporting life turned upside down

RUGBY LEAGUE: As the game goes into its first winter hibernation Guy Hodgson finds old habits dying hard

Try to get a first-team shirt in Wigan's club shop and you will be disappointed. England or Wales, yes, but the cherry and white hoops? Not a chance. "We are expecting a new batch in the next few weeks," the manageress said. Normally at this time of the year the shelves would be overflowing with around 2,000.

Normality is an elusive commodity in rugby league. The sport has switched from winter to summer seasons and with it all previous experience was discarded. Like Santa if he suddenly found Christmas had fallen in July, ask almost any question and the answer usually comes back: "We're not sure. You'll have to ask in a couple of years."

Muddied bodies playing in freezing conditions are almost as anachronistic now as Eddie Waring and his "up an' unders". In past years Wigan's Central Park would have had at least 10,000 people packed in at the weekend. On Sunday the only sounds came from the traffic on the nearby River Way main road.

For Super League read the need for super acclimatisation. "It's a changing time," Joe Lydon, Wigan's manager, said, "and one where you are not certain what you can and can't do. The whole ethos of rugby league has changed and history means nothing any more. The players, the spectators and administrators are on a huge learning curve."

No group more so than the players. Even at the smaller clubs many have gone full-time, their wages pushed up by the money coming into clubs from BSkyB. The stereotype of the film This Sporting Life and Richard Harris swapping a coal miner's helmet for a scrum cap is old hat. A rugby league back now attacks weights in preparation for next season, no thought for the pit face even if he could find one open.

Wigan's first-team squad, for example, had only three weeks off between October and February. These are not the players who made the Great Britain tour to the southern hemisphere or those who have taken the shilling offered by rugby union clubs, but the standard pros whose culture was knocked askew by two seasons, one after the other, to make the switch from winter to summer. They are now learning their trade on winter afternoons where they once practised it.

There is barely a nod in the direction of tradition in Wigan: two fixtures planned for Boxing Day and New Year's Day, home and away against St Helens. Friendlies? "You've got to be joking," a woman supporter replied. "There'll be at least 20,000 there.

Those matches are very important." Even so, you wonder how long even these 100-year-old territorial rights will survive in the new age.

"It's a different lifestyle," Jim Quinn, the chairman of Oldham Bears, said. "Instead of dark nights driving over the Pennines to go training after work, a player is more likely to take his children to school, come into the club for training and be back in time to collect the kids in the evening. The players are fitter, faster and better."

There is a fitness, too, to ground share as the switch to summer has cleared one major obstacle. In the past football and rugby league clubs have cohabited but the cost to the pitch has been enormous. Now improved turf technology and the minimal overlapping of seasons makes the prospect far more feasible.

The Bears will be among the first of a new wave venturing down that path, sharing Oldham Athletic's Boundary Park next summer with a view to a possible joint venture in a new stadium built in conjunction with a local council. Their old ground, the rickety Watersheddings, meanwhile, is being pulled down.

What of the spectator? He and she have had to accommodate the new world as much as anyone. In Wigan a survey has revealed an antipathy to summer rugby but the crowd figures elsewhere do not back that up. Attendances were down at Central Park in Super League - an average 10,168 compared with 11,947 in 1995/96 and 14,195 in 1994/95 - although how much that was due to the change or that the team failed to win the Championship for the first time in years is debatable.

At rugby league headquarters in Leeds they are thoroughly upbeat. "Every Super League club with the exception of Wigan," their official report reads, "has had a higher average attendance in summer 1996 than the average of their last 20 years." Four clubs doubled their 20-year average while Bradford Bulls showed a 96 per cent increase.

"It's got to be an improvement to have the sun on your back watching a game played on the top of the turf," Quinn said. "Of course the rugby league traditionalist will have his misgivings, we understand that. You can't just change things that have been going for a hundred years without upsetting him. It's up to us to persuade him and others that the game is worth persevering with. I think we'll succeed."