Great Britain at the Rugby League World Cup

About Great Britain in rugby league

Great Britain — the "Lions," a combined England/Wales/Scotland representative side — won three of the first eight World Cups (1954, 1960, 1972) and was Britain's standard World Cup team at every tournament except 1975 (when England and Wales briefly split into separate sides) up to and including 1995. From that point the Rugby Football League began sending separate home-nations teams (England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland) to the World Cup instead, and Great Britain has played only occasional standalone tours since — most recently a difficult 2019 tour in which the Lions lost all four matches, to Tonga, New Zealand (twice) and Papua New Guinea. Whether the Great Britain brand gets revived for future tours, or England continues in that role permanently, remains an open question for the sport's administrators. The 'Lions' nickname was first used for the team from 1922, succeeding an earlier 'Northern Union' identity from the code's 1895 split with rugby union, and Great Britain's very first Test — a 14-6 win over New Zealand at Headingley in Leeds on 18 January 1908 — predates the World Cup itself by nearly half a century. After the winless 2019 tour, several of the Lions' own players and head coach Wayne Bennett faced public scrutiny over whether a squad drawn almost entirely from England still justified the separate Great Britain brand at all.

Sources

• Great Britain national rugby league team — Wikipedia