Sourcing caveat: Referee confirmed 10 Sep 2026 via this final's Wikipedia article, directly re-fetched by the assistant, closing a gap left open by an earlier pass (H. Horsfall). Try scorers and goal kickers could not be confirmed for this final. A second-pass search (Aug 2026) found that, unlike most other 1920s finals checked, Wikipedia's lineup template for this one is partly filled in rather than blank — six Swinton names and one Warrington name were present. However, repeated attempts to extract that table's exact row-by-row cell alignment produced inconsistent position assignments each time (the underlying page markup did not render cleanly), so the position label given for each of the six Swinton names below should be treated as lower-confidence than this site's other 1920s lineups, even though the six names themselves appeared consistently across every extraction attempt. Billy Kirk's Warrington position (scrum-half) was separately and explicitly confirmed via his own Wikipedia biography, which also notes he was carried off injured during the match. No squad numbers are given since numbered shirts were not yet standard practice in this period.
Scorers
Swinton
No scorers recorded.
Warrington
No scorers recorded.
Teams
Swinton
Warrington
Albert Atkinson
Prop
Billy Kirk
Miller Strong
Hooker
Les Perkins
Match officials
Referee
H. Horsfall
Match report
Swinton edged Warrington 5-3 at Central Park, Wigan, to claim their third Challenge Cup from four final appearances, and in doing so completed the League and Cup double that season. The attendance of 33,909 set a new record for a match at Central Park, and gate receipts of £3,159 1s 11d reflected the fixture's growing commercial importance. It was Warrington's first of what would become several final defeats through the interwar and post-war periods. 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 28th Challenge Cup final played, and, under the name “Swinton,” 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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