Sourcing caveat: The referee could not be confirmed for this final. A second-pass search (Aug 2026) found no Wikipedia lineup template for this final, but individual player pages and the ORL Heritage Trust club-history site confirmed four Oldham (team1) players: scrum-half Reginald Jones, forwards Fred Ashworth and Jack Read, and captain Bob Sloman, the last of whom is also explicitly credited with a try in his own biography. A third-pass search (Aug 2026, this pass) found the Oldham RLFC Heritage Trust's own match-report page for this final, which gives a full 13-man Oldham squad (nine new names — Herbert Comm, Abe Johnson, Syd Rix, Alf Higgs, Tom Holliday, George Hesketh, Jack Scaife, Rothwell Marlor and Albert Brough — completing team1 to 13 of 13) and a complete scoring breakdown: tries by Holliday (3), Brough, Sloman and Rix, and goals by Brough (2) and Johnson (2), which sums exactly to the 26-3 final's Oldham side of the 26-7 scoreline (6 tries at 3 points plus 4 goals at 2 points = 26), so this is treated as the full and final scoring record rather than a partial one, and replaces the earlier partial team1_tries list. As with the equivalent source used for the 1923/24 and 1925/26 finals elsewhere in this file, that page lists players only by squad number with no explicit position words, so the position given for the nine new names is inferred from the standard front-to-back team-sheet order used by this club in this era (see the 1923/24 caveat for the full reasoning), and should be treated as lower-confidence than this entry's Wikipedia- or biography-sourced labels. Swinton (team2) remains entirely unconfirmed — the Heritage Trust site, as an Oldham-specific archive, does not cover Swinton's side. No squad numbers are given for Swinton since numbered shirts were not yet standard practice in this period.
Scorers
Oldham
Tries: Tom Holliday (3 tries); Albert Brough; Bob Sloman; Syd Rix Goals: Albert Brough (2 goals); Abe Johnson (2 goals)
Swinton
No scorers recorded.
Teams
Oldham
Swinton
Match officials
Referee
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Match report
Oldham beat Swinton 26-7 at Central Park, Wigan, in a rematch of the previous season's final with the roles of favourite reversed. This final holds a notable broadcasting landmark: it was the first Challenge Cup final broadcast live on BBC radio, bringing the match to a national audience beyond the 33,448 present at the ground for the first time. The wide winning margin made it one of the more one-sided finals of the decade. The Rugby League Challenge Cup is rugby league's oldest and most prestigious knockout competition, first contested in 1896/97 under what was then the Northern Union. Its history has been interrupted only by the two World Wars, with four editions lost between 1915/16 and 1918/19 and one more in 1939/40; the finals played either side of those gaps, and during the Second World War itself, were sometimes contested as regional or two-legged fixtures under wartime emergency arrangements rather than the usual single showpiece match. For much of the competition's early history the final rotated around northern club and representative grounds such as Headingley, Fartown, Central Park and the Athletic Ground, Rochdale, before Wembley Stadium became the final's permanent home from 1928/29 onward (with a short break during Wembley's 2000-2007 reconstruction, when finals were staged at Murrayfield, Twickenham and the Millennium Stadium instead). This was the 27th Challenge Cup final played, and, under the name “Oldham,” the 3rd Challenge Cup title for the club. The result is recorded in this site's full results table alongside every other Challenge Cup final played since the competition's 1896/97 inception, cross-referenced against the venue and attendance figures gathered for that table. As with all of this site's rugby league match reports, any statistic that couldn't be confirmed from an accessible source — a scorer's name, an exact minute, a goal-kicking split — has been left out entirely rather than estimated, in line with the sourcing standard applied across the Challenge Cup, World Cup, World Club Challenge and domestic finals coverage on this site.
Early rounds feature amateur and community clubs alongside professional ones; team names are linked only where this site has a team page for that exact club, matching the same safety-first approach used for the Final's own results table.
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