Some good pictures of the great man on the Warrington Guardian website.

Thought you was going to we reincarnating him as a replacement for Lineham....... sorry il leave now

If he had played in these days he would have earned a small fortune.

As it was then (for all players)the money was not great most of it generated was put back in the boardroom coffers.

Sad to say he ended up as a security man on Portsmouth shipyard until he retired.

But he enriched a whole generation with wonderful memories !

Sadly, he wouldn't get a shirt now in the modern game. His ability to win a quick PTB, draw a penalty, or his ability to smash into an oncoming pack fielding a kick return would be questioned.

I'm afraid you're right. The nearest to Bevan in the modern era was the Widnes version of Offiah. Once he moved to Wigan they tried to change him into the all purpose winger and for me some of the magic was lost.

Wigan have always spoilt the game of rugby

Bevan wouldn't have been able to do what he did back then, coming over from Roosters reserve grade to look for clubs in England, as he wouldn't have been able to get a work permit.



He would have had a long and glorious career in Australia. Even if he slipped through the net at one club, the Aussie tiers of rugby league are sufficiently structured that a player scoring multiple tries per game would soon get noticed, whether he was doing that in the NSWRL cup or went to the Queensland Cup or whatever. He would soon find himself in first grade.



Wires71 raises the issue of what would happen if he had flaws in his game that were accepted in the 1950s but would be frowned upon in the modern game. First, given modern conditioning, he would have looked different physically. If he did have flaws technically and they weren't tightened up with coaching then I guess it depends on how far ahead of his peers he was as a finisher. Nathan Blacklock for example was a pure try scorer but didn't get many representative honours as he was deemed to have downsides that his rivals didn't have. But there probably wasn't much difference in the positive things that Blacklock brought, compared to his rivals like Sailor, Tuqiri.



Bevan in his day was streets ahead of even his best peers as a try scorer, and if he was still like that today he would be a Kangaroo and Origin legend. It's one thing having doubts about Kevin Penny but another having doubts about a player who scores hat-tricks, 4 or 5 try hauls on a regular basis, you can tolerate a lot of flaws with that return.



The Offiah comparison is an interesting one. I never saw Bevan but I imagine him to have had the thing Offiah did which was not just being a superb athlete but having a different game sense and awareness of space to every other player, that he would appear anywhere on the pitch at the right time to make the killer break. You don't get that kind of player around today. Even in Aus, I can't remember any other player than Offiah who had that. Despite the clubs he played for, Offiah was the player that made RL more exciting than any other player in my lifetime.

Good post. Just a correction though I don't believe the flaws existed in the 1950s as the game was so different. For one the kick return dominance would not exist before the 4 tackle rule (1966)

Did no Aussie team try and sign him? You would have thought they would have been banging his door down!

My Dad who saw Bevan throughout his pomp always told me he couldn't tackle for toffee, but his team mates did all that for him with pleasure,and then stood back in wonder as he scored try after try after try.

Probably did but couldn't afford him. We had him as a marquee player so only the first two shillings sixpence of his salary counted on the cap.

Aye and he licked road clean with his tongue...