Since the second world war, its final has routinely attracted in excess of 70,000 fans, and it has been graced by such teams as the Wigan who reigned supreme between 1987 and 1995, surely one of the most dominant ever to play a major sport.

The Northern Rugby Football Union Challenge Cup was first competed in the season 1896-7. Sixty clubs entered, and on April 24, 1897, Batley beat St Helens 10-3 in front of 13,492 people at Headingly in Leeds.

The competition was interrupted by the first world war, though it was held in 1915, when rugby league, like football, completed the season that had begun before war was declared. Thereafter, it was suspended until the end of hostilities. At the start of the second world war, rugby league and football both suspended their seasons immediately, but the Challenge Cup only took a single year’s break before resuming, on a limited basis and with the support of the authorities, as part of keeping up morale.

Dr Tony Collins of De Montfort University, author of Rugby League In Twentieth Century Britain, explains that the game’s democratic self-image was well-suited to the rhetoric of the "people’s war", and the Challenge Cup finals got big crowds as the game raised money for Prisoners of War and for Lord Beaverbrook’s armaments programme.

Wembley-bound

These wartime finals took place in the game’s Northern heartland, but since 1929, the Challenge Cup Final had been held at Wembley. In 1928, noting the excitement in Huddersfield that the town’s football team was playing at Wembley in the FA Cup Final, the rugby league authorities voted for the move. The 1929 match-day programme read, "Thousands of Northern people who in their highest flights of fancy have only dreamt of a visit have made the metropolis their Mecca today," and the move to Wembley helped give the regional game a day of national prominence.

The festival nature of the Final, a grand day out that was not confined to supporters of the clubs involved, is highlighted by a leaflet produced by Wakefield Trinity to advertise a chartered trip to the final in 1938. "Do you want to see the sights of London?" it said. "Do you want to see the Rugby League Cup Final? Do you want the trip of a lifetime?" This gala atmosphere, Tony Collins points out, persists as rugby league towns continue to send busloads of supporters - irrespective of who’s playing.

Rugby League’s move to the summer, which meant that the Challenge Cup was a pre-season tournament until its move to August last year, along with the increasing emphasis on the Super League Grand Final and the absence of Wembley, have shorn some of the lustre from the Challenge Cup. But Cup Competitions will always offer something special: in recent years the tournament has seen the introduction of teams from France and even Russia as it continues to raise the profile of the one major British sport with a distinctly Northern heritage.