ON Saturday Wigan gave one of the best performances I’ve ever seen from a Challenge Cup Final winning team.
They were far too good for Hull KR on the day and every one of their players rose to the occasion without exception.
They were the perfect team on the perfect day, in temperatures that hovered around 28 degrees Centigrade.
It was a sweltering day and Wigan made light of it.
It was the best Wembley display by a winning team since Warrington’s 30-6 demolition of Leeds Rhinos in 2010, which was characterised by a superb Lance Todd Trophy performance by Lee Briers and three tries by Aussie forward Chris Hicks.
Writing about Warrington after that final, I contended: “No other team that has ever played at Wembley – and I include those eight Wigan teams from 1988 to 1995 – would have been able to beat them.”
That was a day on which everything went right for Warrington but I think the Wigan team we saw on Saturday would have matched them.
Two key differences between that 2010 final and the one played 16 years later is that the earlier game was played on the August Bank Holiday weekend and attracted an official attendance of 85,217.
Since then the RFL made the foolish decision to move the final to the end of May or early June, and the official attendance has fallen to 56,383.
Wigan’s performance in particular surely deserved to be played in front of a sold-out stadium.
It seems that, when it comes to big games, Wigan always rise to the occasion.
In fact that could be their supporters’ motto, in much the same way that the supporters of St Helens have adopted the slogan ‘Never write off the Saints’.
It’s almost impossible to imagine, after seeing their performance on Saturday, how Wigan could have lost at home to Huddersfield Giants a few weeks earlier.
But when everything is on the line, they clearly deliver.
And their star player, who won the Lance Todd Trophy, was stand-off Jack Farrimond, just as Lee Briers was 16 years earlier.
And I would suggest that Farrimond has given his coach Matty Peet a giant-sized headache.
At the age of 20, he is clearly far too good to be playing reserve-grade rugby. But he is competing for the stand-off spot against the supreme talent of Bevan French.
When French returns to full fitness he will presumably reclaim the stand-off position in the starting lineup.
Having two such great players vying for one position is a great problem for Peet to have and I’m looking forward to seeing how he deals with it. I assume that he will put French in the starting lineup with Farrimond on the bench, although he may also do the opposite, as we saw on Saturday and which worked so well, with Farrimond playing alongside and complementing the performance of his halfback partner Harry Smith.
I’ve written before in this column that sometimes you get an inkling of how a game is going to unfold during the first few minutes of action.
In the third minute of the game on Saturday Dean Hadley suffered a head injury trying to tackle Adam Keighran and had to leave the field, failing a head-injury assessment and being replaced by Rhyse Martin.
Less than a minute later Jack Broadbant knocked the ball on in a Sam Walters tackle and Hull KR challenge the referee’s decision.
The video-referee’s decision was inconclusive and the knock-on stood, which led immediately to the first try by Farrimond from the scrum, which saw him stepping brilliantly inside Tyrone May.
The signs looked ominous for the Robins.
Then Walters appeared to knock the ball on, but Wigan challenged the decision and were awarded a penalty, allowing them to maintain the pressure.
And soon after that, Wigan had a stroke of luck when Harry Smith tackled Tom Davies high, but only conceded a penalty when some observers might have expected him to be yellow-carded.
By then I had concluded that it was definitely going to be Wigan’s day and their growing confidence was there for all to see.
In the 31st minute Mikey Lewis suffered a painful ankle injury and for the rest of the half he was effectively a passenger. I’m sure Willie Peters must have thought seriously about bringing him off the field at that point.
Farrimond scored his second soon afterwards and despite Peta Hiku scoring on the stroke of half-time from a great kick over the defence by May, it was difficult to foresee anything other than a convincing Wigan victory in the second half, which is precisely what happened with some wonderful tries.
If they continue to play like this, they will take some beating.
But there was a blemish and it came very late in the game, when Sam Walters was dismissed for his part in a hugely dangerous tip tackle on Hull KR substitute Bill Leyland.
Bill landed on his head and my initial reaction was that he could have been very seriously injured. It was the most dangerous tackle I’ve seen in a long time and we can only be grateful that it didn’t have more serious consequences.