Practically everything else!

Hi Pricey.

Hi Lord Tony

Interest for me started to wane once sunday home games stopped. I absolutely loved Sunday matches. The stadium was always packed and the atmosphere was buzzing, i can't get to Thursday or Friday games through work and family and a free saturday is few and far between. The buzz for me has gone from the stadium now and i'd honestly just watch it at home now a days. Also the fact we're not a free flowing team anymore and seem to have sold our slill and flair is off putting. apart from Saints the game is very defence orientated now a days, fair enough the old "defense wins games" might be true but it's really boring to watch.

Saw the Trophy in golden square this morning.
Made up that's it back with us, and we've disolved St Helens free kick of a treble this season.

In 20 years we'll have a game where at half time there will be some presentation for the "2019 Challenge Cup winners side" and various balding pot-bellied members of the current team will waddle out there and take the adoration of the crowd, and some of us will be still on this forum lecturing the teenage happy clappers about what it was like to support a proper team back in the 2010s under TS and Price that won four Challenge Cups and two League Leaders' Shields.

Everyone will forget that a lot of the time the rugby was crap, just like when the old timers on here get misty eyed over the days of Woods, Drummond, Blake, Jackson and so on they forget all the times that side used to lose to Oldham, Leigh, Salford in front of crowds of 3000 which is why it usually finished mid to lower table.

Steady on SC, I only walked up to the challenge cup this morning, and your immediately teleporting me 20 years into the future.
If anyone offers me a lift in a DeLorean, I'll know who it is!

I understand your point SC but I can only think you never saw Phil Blake, Woods, Mark Reports, Boyd, Tamati et al play. They aren't remembered fondly because it was 30 years ago, they are remembered because it was awesome at the time to be following Wire.

Go o I.ll bite..the days of woods dessie Blake Jackson I could name many many many more..imagine if these guys played today with a coach from there era they'd have grand final gongs coming out of every hole you could of dream of...bet you one thing we wouldn't lose to a poor cas like we did last week
...but then again I'm a misty eyed old got that was royally entertained in the 80s and the 90s

One of your worst ever posts SC.

Yes and I remember the era when we had Mackey, Davies and Bateman; I remember when we had Langer and Kohe-Love; or the Paul Cullen era with Martin Gleeson and Nat Wood, we played some awesome rugby in those days with some great atmospheres on the terraces, much better than it is today. We also had a lot of dire games where we lost to lower table teams and it killed off our chances of winning anything, just like the team of the later part of the 1980s did.

Maybe we are all loyal to the teams of our childhood which is why the younger generation today get called happy clappers. I am a happy clapper for the team of the turn of the 1990s which is why I probably overrate Gary Mercer, Paul Cullen and Kelly Shelford compared to what they really were. I still believe Cullen was shafted by the powers that be because of his disciplinary record when he should have been a GB player.

If you went back 30 years now and applied the same standards of critique to the team of the late 1980s that you do to the current one, what would you have said? In 1986/87 we came 3rd and beat Wigan home and away, the only losses they had all season. We signed Woods and Drummond who were two of the best players in the league at that point. The next four years we went 6th, 11th, 8th and 9th and the only trophies we won were the Lancashire Cup and Regal Trophy. Surely with the players we had on our roster that was serious underachievement, worse than anything we've had under TS and Price where we've done everything but win the Grand Final, with an inferior set of players.

I get the argument that Wigan were full-time and had that advantage, and could understand if we finished 2nd repeatedly, but we were well off the pace.

This isn't me trying to denigrate great players from the past, I know they were great players. I'm saying if we apply the same level of critical standard to the teams of our youth that we do to the current team it puts some perspective on the situation today. Also I'm interested in hearing the take of those who were around back then too. My guess is that we had a window of opportunity around 1986/87 where we were on the verge of being a really special side and something went wrong with our decision making (86/87 was after Andy Gregory left so it can't all be that).

Very fair points. It was more than just results though for me. It was the crackling atmosphere in Wilderspool, the fact that the club were massive underdogs due to financial clout, the aggression and hostility of our team, the biff, the flair of the Aussie signings. There felt a togetherness with the players and the support. Of course we got beat but our expectations were lower you could rest assured we would give Wigan a bloody good game though.

Difficult to compare with now as since 2004 with our financial backers and large gate receipts and TV money we have no reason to not be competing with the best - at least not on paper. The fact we have not won a GF in 15 years of moving to the HJ Stadium says a lot about culture and attitudes at the club. We should have won 4 on the averages. It's not by accident we fall short of the main prize. That's why we can be more critical now, than then.

Yes the atmosphere point is a big one, which comes back to the start of the thread.

I try to avoid nostalgia bias, and I remember some seasons being better than others for atmosphere, not always correlated with results (I remember the Centenary season being flat even before 80-0, and 1998 being a distinctly dead season on the terraces, but 2001 despite some shockers on the field being a real high point for atmosphere).

Through the 1990s and early 2000s though I thought the atmosphere was pretty good, and it transferred OK for the first couple of seasons at the HJ. Something changed for me around the time of signing Andrew Johns. Remember how great the atmosphere was on Johns' debut. The HJ was rocking. I don't remember that many great atmosphere at the HJ after that.

In the later part of the Cullen era the atmosphere was fractious and frustrated. It got better when TS arrived and we had some good atmospheres in games when we started putting on a run of results in TS' first season, and in the playoff after we won the League Leaders' Shield and nilled Huddersfield although that was more a celebratory-party atmosphere than the great atmospheres of games in the past.

After that, it went back to a mixture of boredom and anxiety. 2011 was our best season in terms of quality on the pitch, but my memory of that was most league games feeling like a kind of dress rehearsal while we piled up big wins waiting for the playoffs, and a nauseating anxiety in the playoff against Leeds which we lost.

It was the same a few years later when we had that big comeback against Widnes in the playoffs. Had that game been a few years earlier the HJ would have been rocking with every score we pulled back, but I remember thinking something was missing.

After that I moved away and so I don't go as often now so I can't comment on every home game but from reading the comments on here it doesn't seem like the atmosphere has got any better.