Sporting Bygones: Loss of Wakefield is still keenly felt in White Rose circles

Wakefield, like several Yorkshire clubs in the two decades prior to the upheaval set in train by the adoption of open professionalism – as opposed to the under-the-counter variety rampant for some years before – had been successful as club rugby evolved from purely friendly fixtures, through merit tables and knockout trophy competition to full league programmes.

Headingley, Roundhay, Morley, Harrogate, Halifax, Sheffield, Hull and East Riding and Middlesbrough had all enjoyed fruitful spells and produced top-quality players who relished a kind of rugby totally alien to that on offer in today's Premiership.

But the tide turned against the footballers and the amateur administrators almost as soon as the professional era dawned in 1995.

Headingley and Roundhay were absorbed into what became Leeds Carnegie, Hull and ER survive as Hull Ionians and the other clubs continue to play – with varying degrees of success – apart from Wakefield.

Their end came with relegation at the end of the 2003-4 season. The drop to Division Three meant their subsidy from the Rugby Football Union fell dramatically and the individuals who until then had been putting their own money into the club to ensure that it could continue to pay players found that, without the RFU cash, the demands on their pocket were no longer acceptable.

Wakefield withdrew from the national league system but retained non-playing membership of the RFU and the Yorkshire Rugby Football Union. Their parlous finances were highlighted in a statement to the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport five years earlier, in 1999, when the club had stated: "Since the advent of professional rugby Wakefield RFC made cumulative operating losses of approximately 500,000".

The end of a special rugby era was brutal but no less sad for those players, supporters and club officials who had drawn immense enjoyment from the brand of rugby played by those leading Yorkshire clubs; saddest of all for those who had been associated with Wakefield.

Wakefield were not the only victims of rugby's myopic gold rush. Gosforth, the pride of Northumberland, was swallowed by what is now Newcastle Falcons; Orrell, the village club on the outskirts of Wigan, once the scourge of more "fashionable" opposition, fell victim to the same funding problem as Wakefield; so did much grander clubs like Bedford, Coventry, Richmond and London Scottish.

Wakefield's aim when they were founded in 1901 was simple enough: "To form a new rugby football club on purely amateur lines".

The club's first captain, England international J W Sagar, expressed the wish that the club would provide the opportunity for grammar schoolboys in the Wakefield area to continue playing the game without having to move elsewhere.

Bill Guest, a future Wakefield and Yorkshire scrum-half, later a long-serving administrator of the club, was typical of the kind of boy Sagar sought to encourage.

Others would follow as generation succeeded generation, Reg Bolton and Jack Ellis, Phil Taylor and Dave Rollitt, Mike Harrison, Bryan Barley and Les Cusworth.

They did not all win their international honours as Wakefield players but they had been schooled in the game the Wakefield way and Sagar's ambition continued to be a plank of the club's success: boys came from QEGS and Silcoates, from Barnsley and Normanton and the other schools in the area simply to play rugby union.

It was a seam of talent augmented by the arrival of quality players from outside the usual Wakefield catchment area, drawn by the prospect of playing a fluid, attacking game against some of the best clubs in the country.

Under a succession of coaches eager to promote free-flowing rugby Wakefield seized the opportunity presented by the RFU's reluctant but inevitable acceptance of the fact that organised competitive rugby was what their leading clubs sought.

The John Player Cup campaign of 1975-6 took Wakefield into the national spotlight with victories over Moseley and Northampton.

A demoralising start to their semi-final at Rosslyn Park led to a 10-6 defeat which could not detract from the fact that Wakefield had established themselves among the game's official "major" clubs.

When the leagues came, Wakefield quickly earned promotion to the Second Division and remained at that level – often among the promotion contenders – for a record 15 seasons. Their attendances gradually rose as word spread that they were playing a brand of rugby worth travelling miles to see.

But, as professionalism grew ever closer, Wakefield were well aware of their key problem; as part of a sports complex at College Grove they were bound to their partners, and no matter how much income they generated through the gate and the bar, they were not their own financial masters.

So they welcomed a group of former players who were willing to put in their money to keep Wakefield near the peak of the English game. But the retirement of some of their better players and the competition for youngsters from ambitious clubs with wealthy backers brought a decline in playing standards and that, in league rugby, heralds relegation, which in Wakefield's case, signalled the end.

Their demise is still mourned, not least for the playing philosophy they brought to the game in Yorkshire, but the problem behind the loss of Wakefield, Orrell and others was not professionalism itself; it was the way the advent of professionalism was managed by the RFU from 1995 onwards.

Those in charge in those turbulent days must bear much of the blame for the way the game was hijacked at the time and has developed – or otherwise – since.

Wakefield RFC Factfile

Founded: 1901.

Ground: College Grove (capacity 3,000).

Folded: 2004.

Honours:

Yorkshire Cup winners: 1920, 1922, 1969, 1978, 1982, 1986, 1990 and 1994.

Northern Merit table winners: 1981-2.

Courage Division Three champions: 1987-8.

Selkirk Sevens winners: 1987 (first English winners in the 68 years of the tournament).

Lord's Taverners' Sevens winners: 1987.

National Sevens Northern Division winners: 1992.