Alastair Brindle played 281 games for Warrington during a 12-year career, but one match stands out for him above all the others: the 1959 Lancashire Cup final against St Helens at Wigan’s Central Park.

Warrington had won three away games – at Workington, Leigh and Wigan – to reach the final, but St Helens, with Great Britain scrum-half Alex Murphy and South African wing sensation Tom van Vollenhoven in their ranks, were the clear favourites. A crowd of 39,237 assembled to watch the action.

Brindle, who was 20 at the time, recalled: “We managed to beat them 5-4 against all the odds because they had a team of all-stars as they always have. We were the underdogs and won with a controversial try by the great Brian Bevan.”

“Bobby Greenough kicked through and Bev chased it and beat Van Vollenhoven to the ball. Voll kicked it dead and it’s controversial as to whether Bev touched it down before Voll kicked it. I was 20 yards away and I thought Bev missed it, but he said he did touch it down. That was the best memory.”

Rugby league was a winter sport in those days and that is not the only difference. Scrums were contested, and fiercely contested at that, and Brindle as a blindside prop was in the thick of the action.

Brindle, who was 5ft 11in and 14st, said: “You had a big, tallish number eight on the openside and a shorter prop on the blindside. It mattered whether you got the ball out. Today the ball goes straight in the second row, but then you had to fight for it. So the hookers liked the blindside prop to get really involved.

“Scrums became that bad that sometimes it took three or four efforts to get the ball out because of scrums collapsing and hookers with feet up, loose arms and all those little bits of shenanigans going on to gain an advantage. And on the blindside you could get away with more because the referee was on the other side.

“The hookers liked you to mess about the other number 10 and the other hooker just to put them off that little bit as the ball came in. It could have been anything. You could put your hand over their eyes or tug their shorts and that’s how the skirmishes started. You had to learn these things and if you didn’t and the hooker didn’t get the ball out on a fairly regular basis you got dropped.

“I saw some terrible things. Paddy Lannon, our hooker, was a great number nine and he was getting beat by the Barrow hooker in the first few scrums. Straight away, he was annoyed and started shouting and getting angry. He said: ‘This next scrum, forget the ball, straight over the top.’ So it was one big shove, over the top and their hooker was down in the melee, hoping it would put him off next time. That’s how it was and everybody accepted it. It was a tough game.”

Obituary: Alastair Brindle