Wigan arrogance.

Any time a team wins a lot of games - like Wigan generally do, or better still, lots of competitions - like Leeds and Saints generally do - then fans of said teams can generally be forgiven mentioning the fact that their team is doing well. Fans of other teams will therefore delight in calling them 'arrogant' when said team loses a game, or doesn't become one of the two out of fourteen to make the final. Ridiculous, but hey.

Wigan and Leeds are by far the most important teams in SL, for the simple reason that those two locations produce the largest chunk of talent which the rest of the League rely on. As a completely biased fan, I'd argue that what Wigan has acheived, in terms of the interest and participation in the sport around the local area, is more impressive, simply due to the smaller population - no other club in the Northern hemisphere has a comparatively large effect on the local interest and participation, relative to "catchment area". I tend to judge whether a team is 'big' by imagining the overall effect (both on SL and the game in general) if they disappeared. No, I'm not so blinkered as to imagine the loss of Wigan would finish RL, but as far as which club would be the biggest loss, only Leeds could make a reasonable case to be up there with Wigan. Please don't take that to mean a lack of respect for other massively important teams - the loss of any team is a tragedy, but if its about ranking them in order, then Wigan and Leeds are top of the list, I think in that order.

As for the competition, it's true that we (in general) only make these points when a loss by our own team brings it into focus, but I think we do have an issue regarding the playoffs. I totally accept that at the start of the season you play the competition as its structured - I'm not going to claim we were the best team by finishing top there, because finishing top wasn't the prize, so tough. ....However....there's a growing problem going on here: It's becoming clear that the regular season is significantly less important. Like it or not, its something we might be able to live with if the playoffs were generating spectacular interest, but look at the attendances - terrible - even last night's crowd. So what we've got right now is an 'unimportant' regular season, followed by matches that people don't seem to care much about.

Can't be right.