IT’S fair to say if there was one club that underperformed in the 2022 Super League season then it was the Warrington Wolves.
Under new head coach Daryl Powell, there was an air of optimism around the Halliwell Jones Stadium which quickly faded following a dismal run of form.
In fact, nearing the end of the season, Warrington found themselves second bottom in the Super League table with one particular game demonstrating the feelings of the fans more than ever.
It was Hull KR away with chief executive Karl Fitzpatrick admitting that he was nervous going into the game with fan vitriol aimed specifically at him.
“The Hull KR game, it was the first time before a game that I thought ‘we are in trouble.’ At that time, the confidence was rock bottom and any adversity that we had the lads would struggle and crumbled,” Fitzpatrick recalled on the Out Of Your League podcast.
“We got to the game late, there’s a crash on the motorway. The lads are getting changed on the bus and then 15 minutes in we are 20 points down.
“What really upset me was later on that year we bring over Matt Dufty from the (Canterbury) Bulldogs.
“He’s chatting to me and my youngest daughter who is into rugby league and she was asking what it was like in Australia.
“Matt said he was a pantomime villain that got hammered on social media and my daughter said that I was the same and she had never said that before. I was like ‘wow’ and I was a bit naive.
“I understood that it comes with the territory, but I’m a human being at the end of the day.”
Fitzpatrick believes that the large turnover in players disrupted the season.
“It does make you more determined, 100%. We had a plan, when we interviewed Daryl he said this was a rebuild,” he continued.
“We didn’t envisage it would turn out like it did but we knew there would be a high turnover of players. We had 14 players off contract and we retained two of them. Within that there was instability.
“On 1st May there are three letters players are given. They are: you are being kept on, you are not being kept on or not yet decided. To have that given to them rattles them.
Fitzpatrick was asked if he ever contemplated that he had made the wrong decision with appointing Powell and he said, firmly, “no” before being asked if he questioned the former Castleford boss’ methods in 2022.
“If he had his time again he would probably have a similar end goal but how he went about it may have been a little different.”
Abuse even lent itself to emails directed at Fitzpatrick with financial ramifications of the bad run of form.
“It was like ‘f**k out of our club you are more interested in merchandise sales than winning games.’
“When you are a leader of that organisation when things aren’t going great you have to be positive.
“If I go in there with shoulders down, feeling down then that will reverberate around the organisation. The financial ramifications were enormous. Daryl was getting abuse.
“He was out of the season and someone gave him half a pint of mild and said ‘I’m giving you half because you don’t deserve a full pint.'”
