Not sure if this is OK so of admins wish to remove NP Just watched Lancs cup final 1977 v Workington and there are loads of great games from all parts of the world on here https://www.facebook.com/groups/1759799 ... ?ref=share Well worth joining and getting your fill of RL This was my first final and just vaguely remember it Would be good for some of the younger fans (say under 40) to get an idea of RL 70s style. "SASH" would have been sent off at least twice these days

Not sure if this is OK so of admins wish to remove NP Just watched Lancs cup final 1977 v Workington and there are loads of great games from all parts of the world on here https://www.facebook.com/groups/1759799 ... ?ref=share Well worth joining and getting your fill of RL This was my first final and just vaguely remember it Would be good for some of the younger fans (say under 40) to get an idea of RL 70s style. "SASH" would have been sent off at least twice these days

I remember that Lancs Cup Final well. Think Jim Nulty scored a good individual try, but otherwise it was a disappointing day. Felt like there were thousands and thousands down from Cumbria.

Willicombe and Ashurst score tries in 1st half
Nulty gets one late on to give Wigan a sniff

All 3 were good tries

Loads of Workington Fans

That team really should have been better than it was. Vigo, Willicombe, Nulty, Taylor, Ashurst and Irving were all high quality players, while Fairbairn, who didn't play in that final for some reason, would be a star player today.

Looked at Bilkos site and Fairbairn missed about 12ish games after the lancs Cup semi final and we lost 8 of them after winning 8 of the opening 9 games

There's quite a few that I can't remember such as Davies, Taylor/Aspinall but I was quite young

The drop off in quality over the next 2 years was alarming

Steve Davies was seen as a promising young centre who, for some reason, never really fulfilled his potential. Alan Taylor was similar, an exciting young stand-off who Wigan unwisely sold about a year after this final. He then came back to haunt us in at least one match, playing for someone like Barrow IIRC, and ripping us apart.

You're right, that whole team was mismanaged and badly dismantled, but that seems to have been a hallmark of Wigan in the 1970s. It was only a year or so earlier when Wigan sold Eddie Cunningham and Stuart Wright, both of whom would go on to be Great Britain mainstays. I know it's easy to make judgements with hindsight, but both of those lads were clearly sensations-in-waiting, and the fact they went on to Saints and Widnes respectively was equally ridiculous, as those clubs were the dominant powers at the time. To make things worse, Keiron O'Loughlin and, almost unbelievably, Bill Ashurst, would be out the door themselves in another year.

But there was also the incredible business in or around 1978 when John Bevan fell out with Warrington and was offered to Wigan for the measly sum of £20,000 (a steal even then) ... and Wigan said it was too much.

It's no wonder we crashed downhill to relegation not long after this.

Thanks for that
Add to that Kurt Sorensen, 15 games and 8 tries.
And interestingly enough I was watching some clips from the Widnes FB pages the other day where they were picking their all time great teams and unsurprisingly Stuart Wright was on one wing (Offiah on the other).
And in the build up to that they discussed the options of each position and at centre Eddie cunningham was in the options with Frank myler, Darren Wright etc. But just missed out to the other 2.
But to think we didn't let Wright and Cunningham go after say 1 season, we let them go after 5/6 years each so we knew how good they were and then they both go on to be top players, GB internationals etc is astonishing, in fact I hadn't realised the both played at Wigan for so long before leaving. I thought they'd only done 1 or 2 yrs and maybe we let them.go before we knew their potential!

So to lose Wright, Cunningham, Sorensen, Ashurst and o'loughlin etc in the space of 2 years and end up were we did is ridiculous

As I mentioned on the OP I was very young so can't really assess or provide an opinion on what happened
Do you think it was purely a Board issue, or do you think the constant revolving door of coaches was a big issue (I appreciate it would be the board who employed and sacked etc, but maybe the coaches got rid of players they didn't want and brought their own players in that didn't work?).
6 coaches in about 7 years after Ashton resigned in 73 can't have helped.

Either way the period from 73 to 81 (which I can only really remember 78 onwards) doesn't appear to be stable in any way.
In the early part of the gang of 4 it seemed similar in that we had 4/5 coaches in 5/6 years, but you always got the feeling each step was a step forward

I've had this discussion many times on here, usually with posters who think Maurice came in and we immediately bought all the best players in the world, we didn't, we had evolution not revolution

We had 3/4/5 scrum halves before we got to Greg
We had 3/4 centres before we ended up with Bell/Iro etc.
We had 3/4 FBs before we got to Hampo
Same in the forwards, we had The Bambers/hodginksons/Campbell before we got to Case etc
Lots of 2nd rowers before West came in then potter and goodway 12months later

Really interesting to hear views of thise who fully experienced the 70s era

Never knew that about Bevan. My PE teacher in the mid 70s. Scary guy to an 11yo Wigan fan.

Sorenson was a great signing, seemingly from nowhere. Only for him to move on, as you say, after a relatively short stint. Then there was a Bill Francis, a regular international, who also got transferred just when we really needed him.

The board got blamed by the fans for most of these mistakes, and in my opinion, quite rightly, though I imagine there was a huge cashflow problem too. Crowds weren't great in the 70s, especially not after the 50s and 60s (and were much smaller than today, for example), and there was no merchandising operation worth talking about. I'm not sure what the TV money amounted to back then, but we only made rare appearances on the telly. And of course we made even rarer appearances in Cup finals in the 70s, even though there were many more to choose from than now.

The constant chop and change of coaches was bewildering and could hardly have helped. Vince Karalius was seen as a good appointment, but stories were rife that he didn't get on with the players at all. There was also a players' strike at Wigan some time around then. I'm not sure what the circs were, but the feeling was that it totally poisoned the atmosphere at the club. We also brought in Kel Coslett, who was something of a legend, but supposedly - and I don't know if this is true or not - on his very first day, he told the team that he wasn't interested in the job and was only there until a vacancy came up at Saints. Unsurprisingly, it was during his tenure that we got relegated.

So, it was problem upon problem. But it all boils down to mismanagement in the end. The CEO and his sidekicks must always take responsibility in my book. Even the appointment of George Fairbairn as player-coach was an error for me. This was a guy who would run his blood to water for Wigan. Even in our relegation season, he won the Man of Steel, and in his first year as player-coach, he got us promoted back to the top flight, but it was plainly too much for him, as we weren't really impressive even in the 2nd Division (though strangely, our attendances went up - shades of 2006!). But when they inevitably replaced George as coach, he asked for a transfer and we lost the one true star we had left.

Compared to all this, the Gang of Four were an enormous breath of fresh air. We weren't noticeably better for the first half of the 80s, but the atmosphere at the club was much more positive. We made better quality signings than we had done for years - Gill, Stephenson, Whitfield, West etc - and were constantly after Dougie Laughton as coach, though getting Alex Murphy was a coup, because while he might be seen as a dinosaur today, he knew how to win trophies and subsequently secured the Regal Trophy for us and got us back to Wembley for the first time in a decade. The rest is history of course. We lost at Wembley in 84, but never really looked back after that.

Sorry, History Time over. But the lesson I take from all this is that, when people complain about the club's management today (in my opinion, having decided that the once-in-a-lifetime era of the early 90s should be the benchmark), they honestly don't know what they're talking about. We've been there or thereabouts since 2006, regularly appearing in finals and taking our share of silverware. Not as good as during the late 80s / early 90s, but a world away from the 1970s, which was a genuine period of very poor, short-sighted management at Wigan RL.

From a personal point of view I think that the rot set in by not changing an ageing team in the mid 60's.
Ashton, Boston McTigue etc were all past their best after the 65 CC victory.
Just my luck to start watching them in the 67/68 season when we were poor and I think we finished 16th in a one table setup?
For what it's worth my old feller always thought that the rot set in when Joe Egan left.

The one bight spot in the 70's was are record of being unbeaten I think for 31 league matches from 70 to 71 seasons. At that point we had a team to build on but we just drifted away from potential contenders without delivering to some truly appalling seasons before our totally predictable relegation.

Yes, it was a very difficult time to be a Wigan fan. To see all those star players getting older and slower was awful. You're absolutely right that in the very early 70s, things could have gone the other way. We had the makings of a new, very good team, but the succession of bad decisions we've already discussed then followed.

Back in the 70s my dad was engaged in getting adult education available for people who hadn’t necessarily done well at school, and was involved in getting some Wigan players in that scheme. There’s always been a “don’t tell” culture in pro sport but several things became apparent. The club was skint and sold off as many players as it could. The players were treated abysmally. The directors picked the team, not the coach. I met Vince Karalius and, though surprisingly quietly spoken, he was obviously a very hard man indeed. He gave me some advice on dealing with opponents which I shan’t repeat here. I agree entirely that there was enough talent at the club to win trophies, but the club was a shambles. Thank goodness for the Gang of Four, and Maurice Lindsay in particular. I’m pretty sure that without him the club would have gone under.