HULL KR coach Willie Peters now has four major trophies in his club’s possession, after twelve months of unprecedented success for the Robins.
He is being widely spoken about in Australia as the next coaching superstar and he has admitted he might be interested in the coaching position with the new club PNG Chiefs, who are due to enter the NRL competition in 2028.
But after Thursday’s World Club Challenge win over Brisbane Broncos at the MKM Stadium in front of a sold-out crowd of 24,600, his attention will now turn to this weekend’s Super League clash in Las Vegas against Leeds Rhinos.
“We obviously knew how big this game was,” said Peters.
“No Hull KR team’s ever been involved in a game like this before.
“We had so much success in the past, especially in the ’80s.
“But this was our first opportunity to be able to become World Club champions, and we wanted to win it.
“I knew that they (the Broncos) were gonna come at some stage.
“They won an NRL Grand Final last year, in the last three games coming back against the best opposition over there.
“But we had a plan, and the players executed it perfectly. To suffocate the Broncos in terms of field position is difficult to do, because they’ve got strike.
“If you look at their team, they’re so well balanced that they’ve got their big fellas through the middle, then they’ve got an organising half who can kick anyone to death on his day.
“We knew, at some stage we were gonna be stretched, but for 57 minutes we were in full control.
“And we lost that control, and lost the momentum, and we had to find a way to win and we did.”
And Peters realises that his attention has now to be diverted elsewhere.
“We’ve been beaten by York, so we’re on zero points,” he said.
“So it’s a weird sort of feeling, to be honest. We’ve just won, and now we’re World Club champions, and no one can ever take that away.
“So we’re gonna enjoy that.
“But look, we’ve got to go to Vegas on Saturday and try and get two points, because we don’t have any at the moment.
“But we’ll enjoy this first.
“I mean, to be World Club champions, is not an easy task, because you’ve got to win the Super League first, and then you’ve got to beat a team like the Broncos.
“We’ll enjoy Vegas, but we’ve got a job to do over there as well.
“We have a responsibility there to make sure that we represent not just us, but Super League and the British game.
“We spoke before the game and I said the people of East Hull don’t get things easy, and the players were gonna have to work their backsides off, similar to how the people of East Hull live every day in terms of their working-class roots.
“But it’s really important now that we crack on it next week, because Leeds aren’t gonna lie down.
“They want to go over there and get two points, and there are a quality team, a very, very good team, so, that’s the next focus.
“I’m not getting carried away in terms of making any massive statements about us, what we’d do over there in that competition.
“I know the product we’ve got here, you know, it’s a really, really good product, because it’s different.
“There’s more attack here.
“It just depends on what you enjoy watching, but I guarantee you next week, there’s gonna be fans there that’ll enjoy watching the Super League, providing that both teams play the way they can, because there will be two really good teams going at it.”