Super League
Never the Easy Option – The Gareth Ellis Story
The Gareth Ellis Story – with Vince Groak
Salford Red Devils 150
A Comprehensive Record 1873-2022
By Graham Morris
Salford Red Devils are one of Rugby League’s most celebrated clubs, claiming a history going back to 1873. During the 150 years since, it has claimed numerous honours including six championship successes and eight Challenge Cup final appearances, four of them at Wembley. In 1934, the team achieved legendary status when touring France, their adventurous attacking play earning the accolade Les Diables Rouges – the Red Devils, a sobriquet officially appended in 2014.
Some of rugby’s most most revered names have worn the famed red jersey including Harry Eagles, who played in every match of the inaugural British rugby tour to Australasia in 1888; Welsh greats Gus Risman and David Watkins, both of whom are included in Rugby League’s Hall of Fame; and Jimmy Lomas and Chris Hesketh who – along with Risman – share the honour of captaining a Great Britain touring side. The club continues to produce exciting, entertaining rugby, evidenced by recent prestigious Man of Steel awards to half-backs Jackson Hastings and Brodie Croft.
Rugby League historian Graham Morris pays due homage to all of Salford’s heroes, past and present, via a comprehensive and wide-reaching set of facts and figures covering every match and every player known to have represented the club since its formation. Backed by over 80 superb photographs and images, several in colour, this is the perfect reference book for Salford Red Devils supporters and Rugby League fans in general.
Touchstones
Rugby League, Rock’n’Roll, The Road and Me
by Steve Mascord
Steve Mascord – born Andrew John Langley – was obsessed with rugby league and rock’n’roll. Long after almost everyone he knew, he clung to these things like twin teddybears, turning at least one of them into a career and making a bit of money out of the other.
At the age of 47 he owned precisely nothing aside from hundreds of records and CDs and almost every edition of Rugby League Week ever printed. He was unmarried, had no car or property and was the proud owner of $50,000 of credit card debt. Then one day he discovered the truth about himself.
He always knew he was adopted but it turned out he was part of a bohemian family, his mother forced to give him up after suffering a mental breakdown. She searched for him until her dying day. Steve met uncles and cousins and aunties he never knew existed and for the first time in his life he felt whole. And he looked around that storage room full of CDs and football magazines and felt sad; a sense of loss. He appeared in newspapers and on radio and television and people thought he was successful but had he really created a life for himself? Or was he living in a childhood fantasy, compensating for what had been missing, ready to fall down on top of him as traditional media imploded?
Steve thought ‘enough of being Steve Mascord, who is not a real person. Time to finally be Andrew John Langley’. Having figuratively thrown all his toys out of the cot, he decided to conduct an audit. Which ones to pick up off the floor and keep in his new life, and which to leave laying there forever.
