Quote Smiffy27="Smiffy27"I thought Cullen was a great bloke who did so much for the club. I thought he was unlucky with injuries (but my memory can't allow me to be specific) to key players.
I was disgusted with how he was treated (by certain sections of the crowd) at the end of his reign. I hated the "boo boys" and the idea that you pay yer money therefore you can hurl abuse. I remember well (as does Paul Cullen) the interception try by Luke Dorn which sealed his fate.'"
There were some injuries but in Cullen's later years a lack of resilience had crept in to the club. Other clubs like Leeds or Wigan could lose players to injury and they would see it as a positive, young players would come in and they would still be strong, and they would unearth new talent. We would lose a couple of players and then roll over. Or we'd have a bad defeat and then would go on a losing streak for the next few games, and Cullen would say stuff like "the defeat last week absolutely took the stuffing out of us mentally" as though it was still hanging over us the next game. We didn't have that in the earlier part of Cullen's reign when he was proud of a "no excuses" culture.
I also think that Cullen, despite his incredible focus and desire to bring success to his club, was underneath it all not the most resilient character. In 2003, he was confident, relaxed, spoke really well, connected with the fans (remember he used to do that walk across the ground to acknowledge the 'there's only one Paul Cullen') and he just personified the new era of the club: after all the troubles of the past, the Warringtonian who had reinvigorated his home town club, going in to a new era in a new stadium. He was the perfect leader.
But once we had our first bad spell in 2004, Cullen became very tetchy. He would be defensive and snappy with the media where previously he'd have everyone eating out of the palm of his hand. I think he created a tense atmosphere around the club and in the dressing room because he was prone to being moody if results were not going well. It's not unusual in a coach but the best seem to have a calmness when things are going against them, that they don't transfer any sense of panic to the players. Cullen did transfer a sense of moodiness which probably showed he wasn't that confident underneath.
I think as this was his home town club, he felt a lot of responsibility to the community, and I think he felt a lot of pressure when Simon Moran started investing more money and scaling up the ambition. He didn't want to let people down. I remember when the first of the big signings came - Martin Gleeson - that press conference was awful. It should have been a big positive thing about the new era but you had a morose looking Martin Gleeson looking fed up at having left Saints, and Cullen looking grim faced and robotic: "this...is...a...statement...of...intent". There was just something really odd about it, it felt like everybody involved felt massive pressure and were worried about things going wrong.
I got the impression that in 2003 at Wilderspool Cullen was really enjoying coaching us but as time went on the job became more of a burden and source of pressure than enjoyment, and the rising expectation won't have helped. I also think he was hurt by the fact that results were not going as well as he would have hoped.
