By DAVE HADFIELD
STRIKE more medals! We’re going to need at least a couple of extra sets.
This paper will be full today with players thinking ahead to the Grand Final. Rightly so, because semi-final weekend is no place to be a loser.
Except that there are losers and losers. I can’t remember a pair of beaten semi-finalists in any competition who emerged with more credit than Saints and Hull did this time.
It’s one of the defining features of a really memorable big match that there should be some exceptional performances from the losers. Think Peter Sterling and James Leuluai when Wigan beat Hull in 1985, or Robbie Paul at Wembley in 1996.
You can only beat what’s in front of you goes the old saying. The feeling of vanquishing opposition that was good enough to have won is a very special one.
You could put Jonny Lomax in that category on Thursday, along with forwards like Alex Walmsley and Kyle Amor.
The following night, the likes of Mark Minichiello, Scott Taylor, Liam Watts and Josh Bowden were brave and often brilliant as they seemed to have seized the initiative in the second half, after Wigan had dominated the first.
A revved-up Bowden, in particular, made a spectacular impact off the bench, while Danny Houghton did what he has been doing all season -nay, all his career.
It will be no consolation at all to any of these players to be told that they played leading roles in a classic. Perhaps when their playing careers are over they will reflect on that. I know that Sterlo does.
Last weekend, before, during and after watching Wigan complete the formality of beating the Catalans Dragons, I had a series of encounters that reminded me just what a disparate bunch of people get pulled in for something like a rugby league match.
I knew Brian Foley was going to be there to present a new award in his name to the outstanding youth player of the season, James McDonnell, so I wasn’t too surprised to see him.
Brian was the Svengali who guided the early development of no end of young Wigan players, including several who were involved last Friday. He used to come down from the hills like Wilson the Wonder Athlete to set lads on the right path.
His latest project, though, keeps him much closer to his Pendle home and to his family. The player for whom he has high hopes this time is none other than his 16-year-old nephew, Herbie Farnworth.
Despite living in the middle of nowhere as far as rugby league is concerned, Herbie has been building up quite a CV. He has spent the last three summers playing for the Burleigh Bears in Queensland, as well as starring for Newton Storm in the North West Counties. He was man of the match recently for England against France at Under-16 level.
That’s despite him doing the bulk of his training on his own on the village green at Blacko. As ever in that part of the world, there is more than a trace of witchcraft and wizardry in the spells that Brian weaves.
I shall be interested to see where Herbie finishes up; apparently the Brisbane Broncos are in the box seat.(continued below)
NEXT UP, I found myself in conversation with the South Lancashire branch of the Catalans Dragons fan club. The numbers of these British enthusiasts, who have adopted the Catalans as their team whenever they are in the country, have run into double figures on occasion.
Now, I fear, they are down to One Lad and His Flag. Still, they take him everywhere with them when they are in Britain, so he reckons he can’t complain. I reckon that, if he sticks around long enough, he might get a game.
Taking the footbridge over the canal after the game, I run into a couple from Coventry who are well and truly lost. I haven’t the heart to tell them that they need to go back that way, battling against the flow, but my estimable friend Dave Hurst gives them a lift into town.
They have planned a weekend around watching Wigan and visiting the town’s best real ale pubs, so it was a pleasure to help them out. Besides, a few weeks from now, I might well be wandering around Coventry equally lost and grateful for any local knowledge I can find.
A little later, I’m sharing a pub table with two brothers who have a tale to tell.
One of them was a decent junior player, a member of the same side as Andy Farrell, at one stage. He fell out with the game for some reason, though, and didn’t go near it for a decade or more.
His sibling, however, kept nagging him to go to a match with him and, as soon as he did, the scales fell from his eyes.
“What I love about it,” he told me, “is the new things that have happened – Toulouse playing, a team starting up in Toronto! I would never have imagined anything like that.”
A little later still, my taxi-driver has winkled out of me the fact that I write for a living.
“You know what I can’t understand,” he said. “No-one here knows the works of Mr Shakespeare and Mr Keats; at school in Pakistan we had to know them.”
He’s never been to the rugby, but is curious about the slightly equivocal attitude Wigan supporters have towards their team this season.
“Perhaps the crow should not imitate the swan,” he said. I’ve searched the works of Keats and Shakespeare for that quote, but without success. Still, I think know what he meant.
