A season with a new chair at its head, a difficult year for the first team, and no proper ending.

A change at the top

Dean Bee attended his last committee meeting as chair on 24 July 2019, after three years in the post, and Gareth Longley took over on 1 September. Tom, Glyn, George and Thomas joined the committee that summer and Joshua stood down. Bee stayed on as a club director; he had by then been appointed to the board of directors of Sale Sports Club, the Spartans’ home ground, and was working with England Rugby on its trans policy and running a national touch rugby campaign with O2 Touch. In mid September the club advertised for an RFU Level 2 or above first team coach, of any gender, to work with its director of rugby and the existing coaches, with applications closing on 1 October. It went into the season fielding two competitive union squads and two O2 Touch squads.

The First XV

The first team played at Level 10, in Division 3 South of the Halbro Northwest Intermediate League, the third of three seasons it would spend in that division. Pre season was a mixed first and second team squad away at Littleborough on 2 September, lost 40–14, with tries from Sam Luke and AJ Morgan and both conversions kicked by Matt Whiteley.

The league campaign opened at St Edward’s Old Boys on 7 September with a 55–0 defeat. Wirral 3rd XV then won 31–17 at Sale Sports Club. Leek 2nds won 53–19, the Spartans already 29–5 down at half time. Sandbach 3rd XV won 43–17 at Sale Sports Club, Carrington won 26–14, and New Brighton 2nd XV won 31–17. On 19 October at Knutsford the run broke: 19–17 to the Spartans, the only win of the league season. November brought a first meeting with Birkenhead Park 3rd XV, known as the Tigers, away, lost 31–19, and a home defeat by Capenhurst, 19–54. The fixture at Winnington Park 2nd XV on 30 November, Rainbow Laces weekend, is recorded as conceded.

After that the results sheet stops carrying scores, although the fixtures went on into the new year; the first team lost away to New Brighton’s second team on the Wirral in February. The Halbro table for 2019–20 has the club twelfth of fourteen, with eight played, one won, seven lost, 127 points scored and 315 conceded. The chair’s report set the year down as a difficult one, with player availability depleted, and recorded that the first team would drop to Division 4 for the following season, against more local clubs.

The Second XV

The second team played in the International Gay Rugby league and in local friendlies. Its IGR fixture list gave it seven matches: home to Glasgow Alphas, Chester Centurions and Newcastle Ravens at Sale Sports Club, away at Liverpool Tritons, Hull Roundheads, Typhoons and Leeds Hunters. The Glasgow fixture on 14 September was postponed. The side won 19–17 at the Tritons on 12 October and beat the Centurions 46–7 at home on 16 November. Against local opposition it lost 36–12 at Eccles 3rd XV in the Halbro friendlies league, 36–17 at Congleton Vets on 30 November and 19–38 to the same opponents at Sale Sports Club in January. On 7 March it hosted the Kings Cross Steelers 3rd XV in a friendly. The chair’s report called this a tough season too, shaped by availability and by the loan of experienced players up to the first team.

Pride in Rugby

The weekend of 4 to 6 October brought the first PrideInRugby weekend, the idea of the IGR trustee Neil Pyper-Hobson, with players from more than eighty IGR teams and ally clubs taking part; IGR’s chair Ben Owen attended the international inclusive brunch in Tokyo, where an anti-LGBTphobia commitment was signed during the Rugby World Cup. The Spartans marked it at Sale Sports Club with a celebration friendly against the Chester Centurions and Liverpool Tritons, the second team turning out dressed as comic book superheroes. The match raised money for the mental health charity State of Mind Sport, which gave a presentation afterwards. The club were also guests of the Sale Sharks at the AJ Bell Stadium, where the Sharks beat Wasps in the Premiership.

Touch and the national campaign

Touch was the busiest part of the club’s year. Through the summer the Spartans led a national campaign with England Rugby and O2 Touch, joining other IGR clubs on a Summer Pride Tour that visited Pride events across the country to certify new O2 Touch centres and start inclusive touch teams. The club was at the Preston Grasshoppers Hopfest on 5 July, and at Liverpool Pride on 27 July, after which the Tritons set up a new O2 Touch centre at Jerico Lane. Brighton followed on 3 August with the Sea Serpents and the South London Stags.

At a very wet Wigan Pride on 10 August, alongside the Typhoons of Lancashire, Wigan RUFC approved the use of its ground as a base for a new club. The last stop was Didsbury on 31 August, where footage was shot for the main campaign video and a conversation with a Cambridge student opened up the possibility of a club there. Plymouth Pride, set for the same day as Wigan, was cancelled for severe weather. Rex Li, the campaign’s southern volunteer representative, made repeated visits over the summer to the Sea Serpents and the Stags at their launch and taster sessions.

A single thirty second radio advertisement ran 462 times on the Gaydio network in the four weeks to 14 September, more than five hours of airtime. By that month six new O2 Touch centres had been registered inside existing IGR clubs, at the Liverpool Tritons, Sheffield Vulcans, Leeds Hunters, Brighton and Hove Sea Serpents, Northampton Outlaws and West Country Wasps, and with only three of the seventeen target Prides still to come the campaign turned to Cornwall, Cambridge, Wigan, Norwich and Leicester. It was proposed that the new Wigan club be called the Wigan Levellers, after the movement born in that part of the country, and a logo was drawn for it.

Over the winter the touch squads trained at Wright Robinson College while the union sides used Manchester Enterprise Academy in Wythenshawe. Touch came back from its winter break on 13 January, the club’s O2 Touch coaches ran a clinic at Preston Grasshoppers, home of the Typhoons, from 25 January, and on 28 February the touch team played in the Manchester No More Mud tournament with support from the Typhoons.

The club off the field

The season opened into Manchester Pride. Two Spartans talked about inclusivity in sport on Mike Sweeney’s BBC Radio Manchester show on 22 August, Virgin Trains invited the club to join its celebrations at Manchester Piccadilly, and on 25 August the Spartans walked in the parade alongside the Kings Cross Steelers, Chester Centurions, Sheffield Vulcans, Leeds Hunters, Brighton and Hove Sea Serpents, Bristol Bisons, South London Stags, Copenhagen Wolves, Typhoons, Northampton Outlaws, Hull Roundheads, Birmingham Bulls and Westcountry Wasps. A stall at the Pride expo signed up prospective players for training. Signed limited edition prints from the club’s Portraits of Pride in Union project, photographed by Andy Barnham with the Sale Sharks first team, remained on sale through the autumn, the money going to coaching and introducing new players and to growing inclusive rugby across the North West.

In December members gave up their time, and their hair, at Eagle Bar in Manchester to raise money for the Manchester World AIDS Day Partnership, at an event hosted by Ky Kelly. The long standing sponsors Via Canal Street and Bar Pop, with Oliver’s and Holy T Europe, donated prizes for the raffle at the Spartan Christmas dinner. In January the club issued a statement of solidarity with Village Manchester Football Club after incidents of homophobia and discrimination aimed at its players, endorsing its campaign calling on the Football Association to act, and Gareth Longley went to VMFC’s County Cup fixture at Eastlands as a token of support. The club also congratulated Lord Robert Hayward, first chair of the Kings Cross Steelers, on the Tankard Award for his services to rugby and to gay and inclusive rugby. In February Longley was interviewed by Global Radio, with clips broadcast on Heart, on Israel Folau’s signing for the Catalans Dragons and on the Wigan Warriors’ plans for their March fixture.

Trans and non-binary inclusion

The club held an LGBT+ Futures Fund grant from LGBT Consortium for a project to develop guidance on trans and non-binary inclusion in rugby, with Dean Bee as main contact in his role as a club director. It ran in three broad stages, and three sessions were held in Manchester in February 2020. The first was an evening supper club on the 19th with grassroots Spartans players, on what inclusive rugby meant to them and on their understanding of transgender and non-binary issues in sport. The second was a workshop on the 20th with trans players from IGR clubs including the Leeds Hunters, Hull Roundheads, Coventry Corsairs, Northampton Outlaws and the Spartans.

The third, on the 22nd, brought coaches and club leadership together to carry the outputs of the first two into practice and agree how clubs would be supported. Dean Bee and Yosh Tazaki held the formal creative briefing and settled on a French Fold leaflet, with feedback from the transgender players who had taken part in February. A conference planned as part of the project became a video instead, a change agreed with the funder after the engagement work indicated a video would be better received.

Then rugby stopped. The filming arranged at IGR UK league matches was cancelled when the RFU halted all rugby activity, and the posting of the leaflets to the twenty-nine IGR clubs in the UK was postponed because clubs had closed. The end of grant report was signed on 31 March 2020. The club estimated that at least a thousand members across those twenty-nine clubs would benefit, alongside the wider rugby and trans communities, and undertook to keep the material available on villagespartans.co.uk and inclusiverugby.com beyond the life of the grant. The club and its members were also instrumental in developing pocket guides and posters with the LGBT Consortium, to educate local clubs on the benefits of greater inclusivity in rugby and to be issued at the start of the 2020–21 season.

Lockdown: Covid stops all club activity.

Following UK government advice on coronavirus, the club announced the temporary end of all rugby club activity with immediate effect. The notice set out what would now not take place. Read the club’s announcement of 16 March 2020 in full. The first team lost fixtures away at Winnington Park 2nd XV and Whitchurch and at home to Sefton 2nd XV, Newcastle (Staffs) 2nd XV and St Edward’s Old Boys; the second team lost its match at Manchester 3rd XV. The Wigan Warriors Pride Day went, and so did the club’s attendance at IGR North Finals Day and the IGR final in Leeds.

The Spartan Easter Bash at Bar Pop on 9 April, the annual general meeting on 14 May, the annual dinner on 30 May, the Summer Draft O2 Touch tournament on 6 June and the NatWest RugbyForce day on 20 and 21 June followed them. The last fixtures in the club’s record are the double header at Sale Sports Club on 7 March, the Steelers’ third team against the second XV and Birkenhead Park against the first, with no scores entered for either.

The spring

The club spent the rest of the season apart. Members made PPE for key workers and raised money for the NHS, took part in the NHS Online Marathon, and followed the lockdown training sessions of Neil Gallagher, a club member and professional trainer with Pyramid Performance, whose recordings were published on the club website at the end of May for anyone to use. An online fundraising quiz on 2 June, with a JustGiving page and half time entertainment from Miss Verry Cherry, was won by team three. Gareth Longley and the first team captain Simon Gammon turned up on an episode of the BBC game show Catchpoint, presented by Paddy McGuinness. The accounts for the year were approved by the board on 25 May and signed on its behalf by Scott Melville. A Diversity and Inclusion working group was set up to reflect on how welcoming the club was to people from diverse backgrounds.

When rugby returned it returned in sixes: O2 Touch training restarted in strict bubbles of six, before restrictions eased enough for larger numbers and for union training to resume. The chair’s report for the year, delivered to an annual general meeting held well after its original date, recorded a season cut short by a global pandemic. At that meeting the club voted in principle to become more closely aligned to Sale Sports Club, and to become a subsidiary of it rather than a registered company in its own right.