MARTYN SADLER reflects on a tremendous night in east Hull after Hull KR’s 10-8 victory over Warrington Wolves on Friday night.
This was the third game in this season’s Super League play-offs and it was the third thriller.
And it means that Hull KR have gone one better than they did last year, when they went out at the semi-final stage 42-12 at Wigan.
Now they will face their conquerors from last year at the Theatre of Dreams this Saturday.
It’s quite remarkable to have been able to witness Hull KR’s rise from what seemed at the time to be a disastrous defeat in the Million Pound Game almost exactly eight years ago, on 1st October 2016, when they were infamously defeated 18-19 at home by Salford, who secured victory with a Gareth O’Brien field-goal in golden-point time.
There isn’t a single Hull KR player who played that day who was still in the team that defeated Warrington on Friday night.
That game consigned them to the Championship and I had fears that their owner Neil Hudgell might walk away at that point. Fortunately he didn’t and the club was able to clinch promotion the following year, finishing third in what was then called the Middle Eights and mercifully not needing to play in another Million Pound Game.
So they were back in Super League in 2018 and the story since then has been their transformation from being also-rans to becoming contenders and then becoming the challengers on the big stage.
In 2018 they finished tenth in the league and in 2019 they were eleventh, only avoiding relegation because they had a better points difference than London Broncos.
It hardly bears thinking about what might have happened if the Robins had been relegated for a second time and Neil Hudgell had walked away, as he would have thought seriously about doing.
In 2019 they had an 18-year-old halfback coming through the ranks by the name of Mikey Lewis who, in May of that year, was farmed out on loan to Newcastle Thunder in League 1. Mikey would go on to score seven tries and 15 goals in seven appearances for Thunder between 2nd June and 20th July before being recalled by the Robins.
He made his Hull KR debut for the club’s trip to Wigan on Friday 9th August that year, partnering Josh Drinkwater at halfback and facing a Wigan halfback combination of George Williams and Thomas Leuluai.
The Robins went down 36-18 and the game started badly for Mikey when Williams sidestepped him to score the opening try after six minutes.
But the youngster fought back and showed his quality by creating Hull KR’s first two tries for Ryan Shaw and Ben Crooks.
He also showed another characteristic that still arises when he annoyed Wigan fullback Zak Hardaker and earned a penalty when Hardaker threw the ball at him.
He was clearly impressive in what was a significant game that saw the debut of Bevan French for Wigan, while Joe Burgess, then a Wigan player but now a Hull KR team-mate, scored his 100th try for the Warriors.
In October that year, having survived the threat of relegation, the club announced that its young starlet had signed a new contract until the end of 2023.
But that wasn’t the end of Hull KR’s troubles. In 2020 they finished eleventh out of eleven in Super League after Toronto Wolfpack had dropped out.
It wasn’t until 2021 that they transformed themselves from also-rans to contenders, finishing sixth and stunning Warrington 19-0 in the opening round of the play-offs at the Halliwell Jones Stadium before losing 28-10 to the Catalans in Perpignan.
The following year they dropped back to eight place before in 2023 they reached Wembley, losing dramatically 13-12 to Leigh in golden-point time and then beating Leigh 20-6 in the play-offs before being heavily beaten by Wigan in the semi-final.
They will now face Wigan again, this time at Old Trafford, and we must all hope for a much more competitive game than the last time the two sides met in the play-offs.
Fortunately for the Robins, their captain Elliot Minchella will be back in their team and he will need to show inspired leadership if his team is to clinch the title.
They can’t afford to go into the game with any feeling of being overawed, either by Wigan and their star players, or by the occasion itself.
Will they be able to snap the apparent law of Super League that a team getting to its first Grand Final inevitably suffers defeat.
Leeds Rhinos (1998), Bradford Bulls (1999), Hull FC (2006), Warrington Wolves (2012), Castleford Tigers (2017), Salford Red Devils (2019) and Catalans Dragons (2021) all attest to the difficulty of winning at Old Trafford on a first visit.
The only teams to have won on their first visit to the Theatre of Dreams were Wigan (1998) and St Helens (1999). And on both occasions the Grand Finals in those years were played between teams who were there for the first time.
It will be a truly extraordinary achievement if Hull KR can snap that precedent.
* This article appears in this week’s edition of League Express.
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