Super League Set of Six: Strength in depth pays off for homespun Wigan

[josie andrews]

Shaun Wane's youngsters step up for Easter double while Brian McDermott's men show resolve in slaying Dragons

1) Wigan and Leeds show the way

It would be easy in the aftermath of Easter to get bogged down in the usual debate about the wisdom of the double-header. But we did that last week , before the event, and even went some way to predicting the Monday mismatches at Huddersfield, St Helens, Warrington and especially Hull KR.

A head of steam is building up now, and I'm quietly confident that the Super League clubs and the Rugby Football League will see sense over the coming months – a dangerous assumption, I know – and make major changes to the fixture list for 2014.

It's far more cheerful for now to salute some of the brilliance and courage that's been on display over the long weekend – and especially the outstanding qualities of Wigan and Leeds.

Remarkably, Wigan were the only team to win each of their Easter fixtures, beating St Helens 28-16 in the Good Friday derby before routing Hull KR at Craven Park. They are now top of the table again, and look a good bet to stay there for a while, making it easy to forget some pessimistic pre-season predictions after they had lost so many senior players over the winter.

It is the manner in which they have replaced the names who left – Carmont, Finch, Hock, Leuluai and Lima – that has most impressed, especially as the senior forwards who remained have been dropping like flies all season, forcing the coach Shaun Wane to go into the derby against St Helens without his four senior props (Mossop, Lauaki, Prescott and Dudson) or Harrison Hansen in the second-row.

Yet Wigan have such depth of talent, and especially young talent, that Wane simply turned to relatively new faces such as Dom Crosby and Greg Burke. Twelve of the 17-man squad on duty against Saints had been brought through the club's junior ranks, a figure that dropped to 11 at Hull KR on Monday when the big Welsh prop Gil Dudson returned from injury in place of Crosby.

Wigan have always produced plenty of their own, of course, but there have been times in the Super League era when the system has been clumsily misused, and they have resorted to throwing money at underwhelming outsiders in a desperate attempt to regain former glories. Those days would seem to be over, and it must make these especially enjoyable times to be a Wigan supporter.

The same goes for Leeds, and for many of the same reasons, although they had to work far harder for their Easter Monday win against the Catalan Dragons in Perpignan . That was largely down to their own indiscipline – there was much more to admire in Ben Thaler's refereeing performance than in the uncharacteristic post-match complaints of the Leeds coach Brian McDermott. But it allowed the Rhinos to show yet again the collective resolve that has underpinned their remarkable record of five Grand Final wins in the last six seasons.

The hard core of Danny McGuire, Rob Burrow, Jamie Jones-Buchanan and Kevin Sinfield were wonderful, with Sinfield's combination of intelligence and bravery – he could be seen repairing a dislocated finger on the pitch at one tense stage of the second half, presumably dismissing it as nothing more than a flesh wound – comfortably making amends for three handling errors in quick succession early in the second half.

Jamie Peacock has long been forgiven for his Bradford past and accepted into the Leeds inner circle, and he was outstanding again, running for a frankly ridiculous 219 metres from 31 carries – after making 176 metres and even scoring a try in the draw against the Bulls four days earlier. Jones-Buchanan's stats were also quietly stunning, with a total of 80 tackles in the two Easter games, and not a single miss in France. But the most heartening performances from the Rhinos came from three of their younger players – Kallum Watkins, Paul McShane and especially Stevie Ward – who showed signs that they will be ready to lead in the future when the golden generation finally move on.

England's coach Steve McNamara must watch performances like that and be tempted to build his World Cup team around McGuire and Sinfield's established half-back partnership, with Jones-Buchanan in the second-row and Burrow to replace James Roby off the bench. But that is probably a debate for another day.

For the moment, suffice it to say that Leeds's current position of seventh in the Super League table is highly misleading, and that the win in Perpignan confirmed that it will be tough for Wigan or any of the other contenders to deprive the champions of yet another successful defence.

2) Shaul seizes Easter chance

One side-benefit of the Easter Monday programme, perhaps showing that every cloud has a silver lining, is that it sometimes forces clubs to thrust young players into the spotlight. Jamie Shaul was the most spectacular beneficiary of that this year, scoring two tries on a memorable debut for Hull FC as they bounced back from a demoralising derby defeat on Good Friday with an excellent win at Wakefield.

Hull's coach Peter Gentle made a fascinating point afterwards, saying that the Easter Monday fixture was ideal for a young player such as Shaul to make his debut, as the pace and intensity of the second round of Easter games is always significantly down from a regular Super League match.

Then Lee Radford, the former Hull forward who is now a member of Gentle's support staff, highlighted another issue that must be a major concern for the RFL, explaining that if Shaul hadn't received his senior call-up he wouldn't have had anywhere else to play, as the result of the controversial decision to scrap the reserve-team competition and replace it with dual registration, whereby Super League clubs can place their fringe players with partners in the Championships.

The problem with that, Radford said, is that Championship clubs are proving increasingly reluctant to select players like Shaul on a one-off basis, understandably preferring to develop some continuity among their own combinations. Something really does need to be done.


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