WAKEFIELD and Leigh have enjoyed rapid ascents from the Championship to the top end of Super League. In both cases, they have overseen a large turnover of players in order to get there.

Sometimes, it’s ruthless. Leigh have let popular men like Ben Reynolds and Joe Mellor leave in their Challenge Cup-winning pomp, and Ricky Leutele after bouncing back from serious injury. Wakefield are showing a similar streak by dispensing with Max Jowitt, Mason Lino, Cameron Scott and Jay Pitts after this season.

But success also means you lose a few you really don’t want to. In Leigh’s case, it was Tom Amone and Kai O’Donnell. Wakefield are set to now taste that bitter feeling too, when Tyson Smoothy departs.

Hookers tend to be an under-appreciated breed. Wigan’s Brad O’Neill this week became just the second in Super League’s 31 seasons to be chosen as Player of the Year by those most unreliable of observers, journalists.

They rarely get the awards handed to their more glamorous brothers in the halves or at fullback, and from an angle you can see why.

On the rare occasion they score a try, the distance travelled can be measured in centimetres. They make less ground with the ball in a match than any of their teammates do in the warm-up. And a nine with a genuine kicking game is as rare as a Wakefield play-off semi-final appearance.

But when they can do a bit of all that and much, much more, they really are something to behold.

Not for nothing do the words ‘Smoothy’ and ‘Rolls Royce’ so often pop up in the same sentence among the Belle Vue faithful.

This may go down as his signature performance for the club, ahead of his premature exit to Perth Bears for a transfer fee which, whatever its value, cannot possibly be enough.

It’s no exaggeration to say he was, at times, the only figure of calm in an utterly chaotic contest which had all the physicality of play-off rugby but not quite so much of the quality.

He got them on the front foot early on with a 40/20. He opened the scoring from dummy-half with his fifth try of the league season. He put Caius Faatili over in the second half, a twelfth try assist.

Then there was tackle after tackle after tackle after tackle – 57 of them in total, almost double any other Wakefield player, and the fifth time in their last seven fixtures he’s reached the half-century.

He’s made the most marker tackles of any Super League player this season, while only Andy Ackers and the aforementioned Mellor have made more tackles overall, both for bottom-placed Bradford who, to put it kindly, have had rather a lot of tackling to do.

And it’s not just his own influence on games, but the influence he has on others and the team as a whole. He’s a true leader of the pack, organising the controlled chaos brought by Trinity’s array of young powerhouses like Caleb Hamlin-Uele, Caius Faatili and Isaiah Vagana.

Of course, that works both ways, as they give him the platform to do his own type of damage. He modestly said afterwards: “The credit goes to our forward pack. They’ve all been unreal, they probably don’t get enough recognition.”

His 80-minute stints also allow Wakefield to carry an extra big man on the bench and here that helped them maintain their intensely physical effort throughout – despite even the brain-snap dismissal of Emre Guler.

It all means Wakefield now stand closer to the Grand Final than they ever have before, and Smoothy also said: “There’s plenty of belief in this group. We believe we can go all the way.”

NRL winner with Brisbane last year, Super League winner this year?

There couldn’t be a better-scripted ending, because they’ll sure miss him when he’s gone.