sally cinnamon wrote:
We didn't bottle it in the 2012/13 Grand Finals but we came up against very good mentally tough teams.
When Leeds beat us that was their 5th Grand Final win in 6 years.
Wigan in 2013 didn't have as good personnel as Leeds, nor us (although the injuries did mess up our shape second half) but they were a tough side. Look at Blake Green as a classic example. A good player but not a world beater. Playing in the biggest game of his life, first few minutes Ben Westwood smashes him in the face and knocks him out. He pulls himself together and wins the Man of the Match. No Wire player would do something like that.
When Wigan beat us in those Grand Finals with Wane as coach I remember thinking how different Wane's Wigan was to Wigan sides of old. You didn't look across their roster and think these are all time greats like you did when they had Hanley, Edwards, Bell, Offiah, Botica and co. They were made up of a lot of young players with fairly low profiles in the game, and some journeymen signings from Australia and O'Loughlin. But all of them, young players and journeymen were very very tough and knew how to dig deep to pull out a win.
2012 we had easily beaten Leeds at Wembley sticking 35 points on them. We had the beating of them.
2013 Messed up our shape? We were 16-2 up when we wenr to poop and conceeded 28 points without reply. Collapse.
The last 2 grand finals were not about our composure we were not good enough with the ball to even make that an issue.
It's interesting to note that in the last 3 GF we have not scored in the final 60 mins of each. In fact we only managed 1 second half try in all our grand finals. When the going gets tough - we go missing.
Statistics: Posted by Wires71 — Fri Sep 01, 2023 8:01 pm
