Halifax Panthers are celebrating a treble of wheelchair rugby league trophies in 2025, having added the Super League Grand Final to their haul in September. Rugby League World talked to one of their star internationals, Jack Brown, about the achievement.
HALIFAX PANTHERS completed the treble in September, adding the Super League Grand Final trophy to their Challenge Cup and League Leaders Shield.
Back in April, Rugby League World spoke to England star Jack Brown about his return from Queensland to play for his native Halifax and before the start of the season, this magazine predicted that, perhaps because of his return, Halifax would be crowned champions.
Well that certainly happened, with a vengeance. Brown scored four outstanding tries in the Grand Final to help the Panthers to a 42-32 win over London Roosters.
But they didn’t have it all their own way at the start of the game. London took the lead through an error than Brown admits he shouldn’t have made.
“We put them in that situation where I didn’t tag up on one shoulder,” he said. “So, I gave them the good ball position and a full set of six on our try line.
“London are a great team so they know how to break teams down and they’re a really good attacking team.
“We didn’t want them to score first, but we had to quickly accept why that happened and then just work on what we had to do to fix it.
“I think the final was a like a game of chess. We had a game plan, but what we had to do was adapt to how the game was being played, rather than how we wanted to play it.
“London didn’t defend exactly the same as they have in the previous games we’ve played against them, so we had to, on the cuff, calculate what was going to work best against what they were doing in real time, and I think we did it pretty well.”
Halifax got back into the game, through a Rob Hawkins try, the first of three from him in the game. But that came after a rare sinbinning where London’s Mason Billington saw yellow. Brown was happy that this didn’t accelerate into more, despite a minor scuffle, which isn’t often seen in the wheelchair game.
“Everyone’s passionate about the sport and no hits were thrown,” Brown said. “It was just handbags at dawn at the end of the day, just grabbing shirts and pulling and so there was nothing too sinister in that.
“I think the sin bin was actually for the play leading up to that where Mason grabbed Rob’s chair when he was in a try scoring position.
“I didn’t want to see a red because that isn’t what the final deserved. Rob and Mason shook hands after the game. I think he said ‘sorry I caught you on a bad day’. We’re all passionate, we all love the sport and it’s testament to how much we all invest in the sport.”
Brown admits that he needed to do something special to break London down. His first try came from a long kick from Wayne Boardman and Brown had to use his strength to outpace the London defence. Brown also created a similar try for Hawkins soon after that, and he had to do well to dodge and avoid the London players to secure his hat-trick.
“In the lead up to the game we talked about how the London defence all season has been fantastic,” he said. “It’s been really hard to break them down with players breaking the line so to speak.
“So, we knew that we had the pace in our side, and that the kick was a valuable option for us. We just had to get our placement of the kicks right and get our timings right for the kicks.
“I think it was a mixture of placing the kicks correctly and kicking them at the right times when they had a high line defence, putting hard pressure on, and trying to trap us in our own half.
“So, as I said before, it was just realising what the game needed from us rather than trying to force something that we wanted.”
In Wheelchair Rugby League, a match can be turned on its head in five minutes. Halifax scored their final try of the game on 62 minutes to give them a 22-point lead. London pulled two tries back, but Halifax used their tactics well to complete the win.
“London scored three tries in five minutes against us to get a draw earlier in the season,” Brown explains. “So, we knew they were always in it.
“In the final, we had a decent lead, and Joe, my brother, turned to me and said that in that last set we’d just wasted six minutes, as we were just holding the ball up, spinning, turning, and London weren’t taking the tag.
“So, at that point I knew that if we could do the same thing again, that we were no more than three sets away from the end of the game. We could drag out the game for six minutes a set.
“That was when it became clear that the game was ours, but we still had to get through it.
“I think the draw in the first game of the season taught us a valuable lesson. It showed us the capability of London, what they were, what they were able to do to us, and how fast they were able to bring that game back to a draw.
“And they could have won that game, they just missed the final kick. It could have been a loss, but we’re very lucky in that sense.
“That was the only game we didn’t win this season, and whilst it would have been nice to have won every game, we wouldn’t have been checked and may have been complacent.
“The league’s so strong now, you have to work hard for the wins and London have made us work this season.”
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 514 (November 2025)