Sourcing caveat: The referee could not be confirmed. A partial lineup was found on Wikipedia's final-specific article's team table — originally 7 of 13 positions for Halifax, 2 of 13 for Salford — with the remaining positions left blank in the source itself; the table includes a coach row for both sides but it was empty for both, so no coach is listed. No squad numbers are given since the source table did not reliably show them for this final. Fourth-attempt update: one further Halifax player — Hubert Lockwood, at fullback — was added via his own Wikipedia biography, which independently confirms he "played fullback, and scored four goals, in Halifax's 20–3 victory over Salford in the 1938–39 Challenge Cup Final," matching the existing team1_goals entry ("Lockwood, 4 goals") exactly and taking Halifax to 8 of 13. One further Salford player — Harold Osbaldestin — was also added, at fullback; his own biography confirms he played fullback in Salford's 1937/38 final appearance (added to that entry's sources) and separately states "he also played in the 1939 Challenge Cup final defeat against Halifax, but suffered an injury in the second half, and was unable to continue" — his position isn't independently restated for the 1939 match specifically, so his fullback listing here is inferred from his confirmed regular position and consecutive-final appearance rather than an explicit second statement, in line with this site's existing practice of flagging this kind of inference elsewhere rather than omitting it outright. A second Salford player, Billy Watkins, is separately confirmed by two independent sources (his own Wikipedia biography and a Salford Rugby League Players blog post) to have also played in this final ("Billy returned to Wembley again in 1939... losing out to Halifax"), but with no position given for this specific match — he already appears in the 1937/38 entry at scrum-half — so he is deliberately left out of the lineup tuple below rather than guessed at a position; this is noted here as a loose end rather than silently dropped. Salford's finish to this game is separately corroborated as reportedly affected by a squad-wide sickness/flu outbreak in the lead-up, per the same blog source, though this detail isn't added to the main context prose since it isn't independently confirmed elsewhere.
Halifax beat Salford 20-3 at Wembley before a then-record Challenge Cup final crowd of 55,453, winning their fourth Cup final from five appearances. Halifax ran in four tries — through Smith, Treen, Todd and Bevan — with Lockwood adding four goals, comfortably seeing off a Salford side appearing in their second consecutive final having won the competition the previous season. Salford's consolation came through a Gus Risman try, but they could not build on it, and this was the last Challenge Cup final played before the outbreak of the Second World War brought a pause to the competition. 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). Since 1946/47, the competition's individual award, the Lance Todd Trophy, has been presented to the final's outstanding player, voted for by a panel of media representatives at the final whistle — on several notable occasions the trophy has gone to a player on the losing side, an unusual honour that reflects the award's focus on individual performance rather than simply reflecting the final scoreline. This was the 39th Challenge Cup final played, and, under the name “Halifax,” the 4th Challenge Cup title for the club.
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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