This was also my first year watching the Wire too. I remember sitting in the car on the way back from Halifax after that win. My uncle turns me to me and goes "Well, that was some baptism into watching the Wire. You gonna come back next year?" And i just remember myself thinking that there really was nowhere else id rather be on a Sunday afternoon, despite us loosing alot of games!!

I remember Cullen's first game in charge was against Widnes and we lost 19-18 i think. Westwood got sent off towards the end if i remember rightly. I was very very gutted when we lost, but thought under Cullen that we were gonna stay up. But i have so many memories from that season and i really do appricate the good times that we have now. But my overriding memory from the season was thinking that Burns and Domic had kept us up. Two quality players that gave 100%!!

yeah we ended up having to beat paris down here at wilderspool which went all the way to the last minute with john hough(remember him) haviong made a comeback to the squad and scoring very late on,though we got some dodgy decisions off cummings that day.

97 was bad, really bad but 02 was something else

paris you say?? don't remember it being them, perhpas im going back even earlier. jeez, this thread is making me feel old, more than anything else! i remember walking over wilderspool causeway talking to the old man saying if we don't win this, we'll be playing runcorn instead of widnes in the future. i think the game i remember was oldham, but you're probably starting to grasp hpw bad my memory really is!

Not sure thats entirely true. I remember a few nervous questions along those lines being put to Neil Dowson at Squadbuilder meetings in 2002, he was saying although relegation would be a blow, the new stadium was happening whatever, it wasn't dependent on Super League, and we weren't going to go bust.

Salford ended up going down, they were no better off than us, their new stadium was hardly imminent, and they managed to retain a full time squad in the National League in 2003, this is what I reckon we would have done. Maybe if some of the bigger shareholders had lost interest in us after we were relegated, Simon Moran would have bought his majority share for less than he had to pay in 2004.

I reckon we would have lost players like Burns, Domic and Wood to other SL clubs and the 2003 team in National League One would have been basically the young players of the time, like Huddersfield had done in 2002 when they came up. Blokes like Steve Maden, Dave Alstead, Mike Callan etc might have had a chance if we'd been down in 2003. We would probably have come up and that would have made a great story, first game back in Super League and moving into a new stadium...

I think it would have been harder to start the big signing drive in 2004 though, if we were in our first season back.

That was 2003 Geordie, 2002 home shirt was white with a primrose and blue V. the away top is still my fav mistly yellow with blue sholders