Time for 'Sir Kev' to make history

N A table reserved exclusively for sporting knights, cricket and football stand joint-top with 30 each followed by Rugby Union with 19. Marooned at rock bottom without a single Sir of its own: Rugby League.

- PETER JACKSON

No wonder their president, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, has spoken out on behalf of the all-time greats shunned by the honours system over the reigns of six British monarchs. "There is something wrong," he says, "when the sport cannot boast one single player over its 130-year history who has received a knighthood."

In that context, this column has discovered something which cannot remain undisclosed even if its revelation threatens the democratic process by rendering the Speaker of the House speechless. When it comes to knights of the realm, sheep-shearing, not noted for packing them in at Odsal and Headingley, ranks above Rugby League.

Sir David Fagan, from the same town in King Country as Sir Colin Meads of All Blacks' fame, gained his knighthood in recognition of winning New Zealand's annual Golden Shears Open championship 12 times in a row.

Sheep-shearing 1, Rugby League 0.

Jim Sullivan embarked on five consecutive winning Ashes tours of Australia with the Great Britain Rugby League team during a ten-year period between the end of the First World War and the start of the Second. The towering Welshman never expected to be summoned to Buckingham Palace.

Fearful of losing his job as an apprentice boilermaker, Sullivan left Cardiff for Wigan at 17 and built a monumental career in League. He died in 1977 at the age of 73 without a gong of any description to his name.

The same applied to other Welsh titans of League from different eras Gus Risman and Clive Sullivan, like the unrelated Jim Sullivan from blue-collar inner-city areas of the Welsh capital.

They wouldn't have complained because a sword on the shoulder didn’t happen to active sportsmen or women back then. Stanley Matthews was the exception, in 1965 by which time The Wizard of Dribble was on his last legs, so to speak, at 51.