A quiet day over the years.
It was the end of the 1975/76 season today, New Hunslet’s third. A 6th place finish with 15 wins and a daw was a marked improvement on the first two seasons. Peter Muscroft set a new try scoring record with 14 and Bob Gaitley’s 99 goals and 208 points were also new records. The last match at Leigh was a 2-41 defeat, the highest score against so far for the new club.
The 1907/08 season was progressing nicely. Having secured the Yorkshire Cup in December, the Yorkshire League Trophy was added to the cabinet today as Hunslet won it by a margin of 9 points over second placed Halifax. With the Challenge Cup semi-final next week and in second place in the league with a Championship semi-final certain, could there be something special happening?
Making their debuts today were David Marshall and Ronnie Watts. David had been with Hunslet for eight seasons as the club folded in 1973. In August at the committee meeting to admit New Hunslet to take over Hunslet’s fixtures for the new season, other clubs were warned not to poach ex-Hunslet players. Around eight players wanted to sign for other clubs but New Hunslet decided to wait for things to settle down. After a few days they relented as they felt it was neither legal nor moral to keep the players out of the game. David signed for Leeds where he went on to play 145 games. His Hunslet record was 217 matches, 455 goals and 13 tries.
Scrum-half Ronnie played his first game at Halifax today in 1962. He’d signed on nearly a year earlier but as new coach Fred Ward had brought in Jeff Stevenson from York as scum-half his chances would be limited in the first team. In four seasons he made 38 appearances (24 of them in 1963/64) and scored 4 tries.
Francis “Paddy” Doyle was registered by the club today in 1950. He played 13 games over a couple of seasons before moving to the new Doncaster club.
