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.The Broncossurvival as a missionary for professional rugby league in the south dependedheavily upon the continued support of the club s sponsor, Virgin.However, the2006 season saw the renamed team form part of a joint operation with NECHarlequins.Past initiatives in south Wales have failed, but plans are alwaysongoing to establish an elite side in the Principality, i.e.a team with a mass fanbase playing at the highest level of the game in Great Britain, and with its matchescovered by Sky Sports.France saw its relaunch of the Super League in 2006, butthis time in Perpignan not Paris.4Thompson actually used the hybrid German term, Geschichtenscheissenschlopff.My thanks to Tony Mason for confirming his former colleague s total disinterest inrugby, when this article was delivered as a short paper at the annual conference ofthe British Society of Sports History, 12 April 2003.E.P.Thompson, The Povertyof Theory: or an Orrery of Errors in The Poverty of Theory and other essays(London, Merlin Press, 1978), p.300.5On the opprobrium attracted by counterfactual history see N.Ferguson, Introduction in N.Ferguson (ed.), Virtual History Alternatives andCounterfactuals (London, Papermac, 1997), p.5-7.6Ibid., pp.4-8; M.Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes (Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1933), pp.128-145.7R.J.Evans, Telling it like it wasn t , BBC History (December 2002), pp.23-25,and In Defence of History (London, Granta, 1997), notably pp.103-128.Withinmodern British history Evans young fogey historians would include Roberts and,perhaps above all, John Charmley, trenchant critics from a New Rightperspective of what they perceive to be an all-pervasive liberal consensus acrossthe academic community ( neo-conservative would be an inappropriatedescription given the term s present almost uniquely American connotations).G.M.Trevelyan, If Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo in Clio, a Muse andOther Essays Literary and Pedestrian (London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1913),pp.184-200.Macaulay s nephew reaffirmed in 1922 that Britain s defeat ofBonaparte guaranteed a hundred years of progress in liberty and high civilization.D.Cannadine, G.M.Trevelyan A Life in History (London, Fontana, 1993), p.107. NOTES 1938Ironically, Ferguson s personal contributions are most open to such a charge,particularly his insistence that the European Union represents a Germandomination of Europe which the Allies victory in 1918 merely postponed.N.Ferguson, The Kaiser s European Union: What if Britain had stood aside inAugust 1914? in Ferguson (ed.), ibid., pp.228-280.9Ferguson, Introduction in ibid., p.18.10The 1894-95 schism in English rugby which led to the creation of the NorthernUnion [the original name for what became rugby league] was not over thefundamental issue of professionalism - or over changes in the rules, as 13-manrugby league only evolved as a manifestly different game in succeeding decades.The dispute focused upon broken time payments to compensate for loss of wages.In London the staunchly amateur gentlemen-legislators of the Rugby FootballUnion rejected the popularly supported northern clubs request to reimburseworking-class players financially penalised as a consequence of taking time offfrom their jobs to train and to play, i.e.their entitlement to compete on the samebasis as the sons of the liberal professions and the landed.R.Holt, Sport and theBritish A Modern History (Oxford, Clarendon, 1992 ), p.105.For the definitivehistory of the early Northern Union see T.Collins, Rugby s Great Split: Class,Culture and the Origins of Rugby League Football (London, Frank Cass, 1998).11 & what is called realism (as opposed to fancy or ignorance of life or utopiandreams) consists precisely in the placing of what occurred (or might occur) in thecontext of what could have happened (or could happen), and in the demarcation ofthis from what could. Isaiah Berlin, Determinism, Relativism and HistoricalJudgements , quoted in Ferguson, Introduction in ibid., pp.83-84.12See extracts from Berlin s Concept of Scientific History quoted in ibid.pp.84-85, notably the claim that, When the historian asks himself about the probabilityof a past event, he actually attempts to transport himself, by a bold exercise of themind, to the time before the event itself, in order to gauge its chances, as theyappeared upon the eve of its realisation.Hence probability remains properly in thefuture.13This works both ways, i.e.political leaders (or even sports administrators!) mayact rationally four times out of five, but the exception can rarely if ever beaccurately predicted; and even the most unpredictable autocrat may suddenly, forwhatever reason, appear to be dictated by reason rather than mere calculation orincipient megalomania (Stalin is perhaps a case in point).14Ferguson, Introduction in ibid., p.86.15 For, in considering only the possibility which was actually realised, he [the solely male? historian] commits the most elementary teleological error. Ibid., p.87.16Ibid., p.88; Evans, ibid., p.24.17Trevor-Roper, ibid.18This section relies heavily on G.Williams, Midland Manoeuvres A History ofNorthern Unionism in Coventry , Code 13 The Journal of Rugby League Heritage,2 (1986), pp.9-14, kindly provided by Tony Collins.My thanks also forinformation provided by a former student, Peter Mills, whose 1997 undergraduate 194 THE CITY OF COVENTRYdissertation drew attention to the Leicester rugby club s prewar brush with theRFU.19On the Coventry club s success in cutting across class divisions, see thepreceding An Oval Ball and a Broken City: Coventry, Its People and Its RugbyTeam, part 1.20Collins, ibid., pp.183 and 69.21Coventry provided five of the Midlands and South team that played theAustralians
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