Celtic Crusaders pursue Holy Grail of a first Super League win
Published on: 16th April, 2009
Celtic Crusaders pursue Holy Grail of a first Super League win | Related News
What is the opposite of hitting the ground running? Crawling, maybe, although even that might exaggerate the success of the first phase of the latest attempt to establish professional rugby league in Wales.
The Celtic Crusaders are four points adrift at the bottom of the Super League table, having lost their first eight fixtures plus a Challenge Cup tie at Hull Kingston Rovers, and their coach, John Dixon, admitted that conceding 40 points at home to Harlequins on Easter Monday was the biggest disappointment yet.
But at the risk of turning this week’s blog into an exercise in straw-clutching, it is still far too early to write off the Crusaders as another failure of rugby league expansion. They can and will take major encouragement from the performances of Harlequins, the Catalans Dragons and, most unlikely of all, Salford over the last couple of weeks.
Quins ensured that Monday in Bridgend was not a complete write-off for the game, giving a highly professional illustration of what it takes to succeed at Super League level. A fifth win from eight matches lifted them to seventh in the table with a game in hand on all the teams above them. That position has been achieved by a team in which British accents now outnumber those from the Antipodes.
Brian McDermott has built on the foundations laid by Tony Rea by spotting the potential in unheralded players such as Luke Gale, Jason Golden and Ben Kaye while the better-known Danny Orr, Rob Purdham and Danny Ward continue to relish the responsibility they have found in the south. Then there are the products of rugby league development in London, such as Tony Clubb and Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook, who are both established as Super League regulars. There are plenty more players with the potential to emerge from Quins’ junior teams.
All this is pretty heady stuff when you think where London rugby league was a few years ago, with a mostly Australian team and the products of their development programme more often than not heading to rugby union. The long-serving Bristol forward Matt Salter is the most obvious example.
Arguably the most uplifting Harlequins performance on Monday came off the field, with a few hundred of their supporters heading west to make a real impression. Home crowds at The Twickenham Stoop may remain frustratingly small, but in their fourth season as Harlequins RL the club seems to be developing an identity.
The Crusaders are in the very early stages of that process – their starting 13 on Monday included only three Britons and a fourth was on the bench, so there isn’t anything particularly Welsh for the Welsh public to get behind. Yet a couple of thousand have done so, despite the wait for a win.
They’ve been dealt a bum hand by a fixture list which began with consecutive away matches and will have included only three games at home out of 10 after Sunday’s trip to Wigan. Furthermore, any chance the Crusaders had of hitting the ground running were stymied by the failure to secure visas for most of their Australian imports until the 11th hour.
But it’s only a fortnight since the mood in Salford and Perpignan was, if anything, even blacker. After opening up with a victory over the Crusaders, Salford had conceded an embarrassing 253 points in six subsequent defeats and the theory doing the rounds was that the only thing keeping Shaun McRae in his job was the cost of sacking him. Meanwhile, the Catalans had failed miserably to pick up where they left off last season, and at half-time in their Challenge Cup tie against Bradford their coach, Kevin Walters, might even have been considering resignation. His team were 26–0 behind.
But now Walters and the Dragons are smiling again after following their famous second-half fightback against the Bulls with league wins against Quins and Wigan. Salford travel to Perpignan this weekend on the back of victories against Hull, Warrington and Leeds – the latter providing their first win at Headingley since 1977.
Everyone is buzzing down at The Willows. The terrific exposure the Reds have been receiving all year in the Manchester Evening News has provided the sort of publicity the club desperately needs in its battle to win hearts and minds in two footballing cities.
Where Salford’s exciting young half-back Richie Myler and the irrepressible elder statesman Robbie Paul are leading, the Crusaders’ Aussies now need to follow. It needn’t be the end of the world if they finish bottom in their debut Super League season, as the Catalans did in 2006. The French club reached the Challenge Cup final the following season and finished third last year.
But even in that difficult first year the Dragons had hit the ground running, with a memorable win against Wigan in their first home match. After Monday’s major disappointment, Crusaders badly need to find their own lift-off over the next couple of weeks.
guardian
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