We interrupt your viewing of the FIFA World Cup to bring you some rather sobering, at first jarring thoughts on the prospect of Saints making it five Super League titles in a row in 2023.
Well, why not? Once you have won four the prospect of winning five looms ever larger. Coach Kristian Woolf may have left to be second fiddle with the suspiciously absent geography of the NRL’s Dolphins, but most of the on-field pieces remain. Of the first team squad which began the 2022 campaign only Regan Grace’s departure can be considered a blow. And even he missed most of 2022 through injury before announcing his move to rugby union. The other departures are a mix of great servants sadly past their best or those just about to leave the station marked ‘youngster’ and enter ‘peak years’ but who have never really managed to convince at first team level. Our Josh Simms and Aaron Smiths.
With the powerful squad they still possess Saints will again be among the favourites when it all restarts in mid-February. Ask the more fanatic among our number – you know the type, the ones who only ever watch Saints matches and so don’t actually have a baldy clue what we are up against – and they will confidently predict that we will romp it in again. The inexperience of Paul Wellens as a head coach is an irrelevance because we are Saints and we have the best squad in the competition by far. The prospect of improvement in other sides is just an idea to these people, not something that they actually spend time worrying about. As pointless as worrying about a nuclear conflict. Unlikely to happen and if it did then for those people there would be no coming back from such an apocalyptic event so why contemplate it?
And anyway who is going to stop us winning again? Wigan? With their really fast players who are so fast that the other 11 can’t catch up to them? And their pack full of grubs who will forever be labelled hot prospects until they each get their Aaron Smith/Josh Simm moment. Leeds with their assortment of big name underachievers? Or Hull, for whom even the winning mentality of new coach Tony Smith is unlikely to be enough to save them from their schizophrenia? Certainly not Warrington, whose front row now has an average age of 385 and whose halfback department will plummet to Championship standard if anything happens to George Williams. The more you look at the competition in Super League the less excited you get about being champion of it. It’s best not to think about it. The rugby league fan’s existential crisis.
What this league needs desperately, more than anything, is for us to lose. No no, hear me out. There is a scene in The Young Ones in which Neil is transported to some kind of hedonistic world (via the medium of ramming a skewer through his head if my memory serves me rightly). Yet the people living in this perceived paradise, in particular its king and queen, are far from happy. Asked why the king is not showing any signs of joy or pleasure on his face the queen offers that ‘the king is bored shitless with interesting things, and frankly, so am I”.
This is roughly my experience of the Woolf years. It was all I could do to avoid stifling a yawn at times as we relentlessly suffocated our opponents into submission. Yes, I want us to win. I have had enough of losing in the 80s. My distaste for Wigan is nothing to do with their close geographical proximity, their accents or the fact that they foisted Kay Burley upon us. It’s simply and only because they just wouldn’t stop winning when I was a child and it had a profound effect on me. And it wasn’t until the last few years under first Justin Holbrook and then Woolf that I could relate to the glum look on their fans’ faces when we passed them on the motorway on the way home after they had taken another Challenge Cup away from us. They were fed up with not having anyone on their level. Won’t somebody please just give us a game? This is how I have been feeling recently amid the joyless Woolf processes.
Winning every year might be tolerable if it were done in a flambouyant, entertaining fashion. And who knows, maybe Wellens will abandon every principle he has learned under Woolf and re-establish Saints as a devil-may-care, maverick shower of risk takers. We might still win playing that way but there would be much more doubt about it. It might be touch and go at times. If it were heart-stopping stuff it would be so much more enjoyable. But it’s been inevitable almost from the moment that Holbrook walked through the door in 2017 and set about the task of cleaning up after Keiron Cunningham. The whole situation has got out of hand under Woolf. Who is to say that the predictability of it all didn’t play some part in his decision to join a team that won’t admit where it comes from? Maybe Woolf is also bored of Woolfball.
If you’re not convinced by the argument that I’m bored by it, which admittedly has a limited appeal outside of my own head, consider the ramifications for the game as a whole. Fans of other clubs and neutral observers must be losing hope. Why should they continue to invest in something which does not even offer the slightest glimmer that their day may come? We queue up to barf on about how the game needs sponsors and investment and more media and TV coverage, and yet we turn up week after week desperately hoping that we can bore another opponent to death on our way to yet more silverware. We are chronically bad for the game and we have to go. At least for a while until we’ve all had long enough to forget what it is like to dominate the league year upon year.
And anyway, think of it like this. If we lose this year, and next year, and maybe the year after, how good will it be when we win again? After a trophy drought of a few years even style critics like me will stop caring how we achieve it, and once more take joy in winning ugly. I will never forget how we won the title and the Challenge Cup for the first time in my lifetime when I was 21 years old. No victory since has ever come close to the level of gloriousness of 1996. How I long for the day in 2027 when we win our first trophy in five years thanks to a last minute George Delaney barge over at the end of a set of six entirely devoid of passes from anywhere other than 40 year-old dummy half James Roby.
Now that would be joyous.
OK, as you were. Back to the football...
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