Have to agree with all of this. Texted a mate at half-time saying fatigue/fitness wins or loses this. Ratch injury a disaster for Wire. The respect shown by both sets of players for each other at the end went a long way to alleviating my disappointment - if those lads can take defeat (and indeed victory) so honourably, who are we to get all y about it and chuck stuff at the telly (as I was doing).

By the way, the stats are not made up by me, they collected by independent observers. As opposed to random outbursts about boybands...!! Speaking of which, presumably according to your logic Finch and Lima in the past and all the Wigan players who had been publicly expressing how important Lockers was to the team in the run up to the GF (Tomkins gave an interview in which he said Lockers was the best player at Wigan) are like 1D fan obsessives?

You even seem to object to the use of the nickname "Lockers". It's used by lots of people connected with the club, including our coach.

Oh dear...

Agreed, Smith played very well and if I'm allowed to say this without being accused of "sickening adulation" ( ) Green's performance was fantastic. He thoroughly deserved the Harry Sunderland trophy.

To be fair to Briers and Myler though, they were playing behind a beaten pack and they just didn't get enough ball close to Wigan's line.

I wasn't that confident (!) but felt we had a chance - I was confident that the longer the game went on the stronger we would be, but a 14 point lead was a big margin!

From a Wire point of view, I'd say O'Loughlin is a very good player and probably the one type of player we actually lack at the club, who would make us a significantly better side - He reminds me of Mike Gregory, a player who did a lot of things very well, but, to the casual observer, wasn't particularly eye-catching because he never did the flair things like a Ellery Hanley could.... Importantly, both Gregory and O'Loughlin were/are great leaders, who are both greatly admired and appreciated by the most important people, and that's their team mates.

Personally, I'd take O'Loughlin in a heartbeat - He'd offer so much more than the present Wire set up of basically having an extra prop at loose forward, and would also take a lot of pressure of our half backs.

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