They beat Wigan last season and they are capable of doing so again

“They beat Wigan last season and they are capable of doing so again.” Paul should know. Almost exactly a year ago, he scored a try and four goals for Trinity at Central Park, the last time that Wigan were beaten at home in a league match.
From that day, Wigan were determined to add Paul, snapped up from the Junior Kiwi tour by the then Wakefield coach, David Topliss, to their side As is so often the case, they got their way. Despite a slight blip when he had an uncomfortable match at full-back against St Helens in the drawn Challenge Cup tie last Saturday and was substituted, Wigan have had no reason to regret that move.The Wigan jury is still out on the case of their previous signing from Wakefield, the stand-off Nigel Wright. He, too, had a marvellous game against Wigan two years ago and, at the end of that season, became a Wigan player. At £140,000, he became the game’s most expensive teenager.Wright’s first season at Central Park was not a success. A combination of injuries and teething troubles with his new team-mates stopped him establishing himself at stand-off – although he played in that defeat by Trinity – and he has been allowed this season to return to Wakefield on loan.Back at Belle Vue, he has once more shown the mouth-watering array of skills that persuaded Wigan to invest so heavily in his services.

His future is a matter for conjecture; Wakefield would love to re-sign him but would struggle to raise the money, while Wigan may yet want to recall him as the replacement for Frano Botica next season when the New Zealander joins the Auckland Warriors.This afternoon is the perfect opportunity to show that he still has much to offer and the comparison with Paul will be fascinating. As a gifted natural stand-off, Wright is enough of a rarity still to be of inestimable value. Where Paul, three months his junior, has the edge is in his versatility.Already this season, Paul has shone at full-back, centre and stand-off, while the Wigan coach, Graeme West, has not hesitated to switch him during the course of matches to loose forward, the position in which Paul himself believes his long-term future in the game lies.The two may yet link up as an ex-Wakefield partnership in Wigan’s midfield. The question, given the track record of today’s fixture, is whether, if 32-year-old Nigel Bell, for instance, has a big game for Wakefield, Wigan will attempt to sign him as well.. AFTER the English hooligans shamed their country at Lansdowne Road last Wednesday evening, anger was not the prevailing emotion.

Those among the 46,000 crowd unfamiliar with the nature of English football were in shock, their feelings most eloquently expressed on the face of a small Irish boy whose hurt and bemusement was frozen on a television image transmitted around the world the following day. Like many another Irish father, Seamus Eager had pulled every string available to get the precious tickets to take his lad James to this game. It seems important to explain – especially to those with power and influence in English football – exactly why James looked forward so much to this occasion James is seven years old, a Manchester United fan. Of course he is an Irish fan as well, and the prospect of seeing Jack Charlton’s Republic of Ireland team must have made him a happy boy as he fell asleep on Tuesday night.
But for small Irish boys, and for many who are older and no longer dreaming, English football is magic and, win or lose, Wednesday was to be a very special night. Shearer, Beardsley, Ince, Le Tissier, Platt and Anderton were coming to our city, to a town that loves English football, its great players and clubs, as if they were our own. Whatever the politicians and other advocates of Irish nationalism told us to the contrary, about cruel England and the imperatives of history, we knew different.We were acquainted with another England, for we knew about Tom Finney, Stanley Matthews, Bobby Charlton and Bobby Moore.

We knew about English grace and decency for we had seen their football teams play: Manchester United, Spurs, Danny Blanchflower’s glorious double team, the Liverpool of Dalglish and Keegan. The combined efforts of the British Paratroop Regiment, the Irish Republican Army and implacable native historians could not persuade us that our devotion to English football was some kind of heresy. We knew something else as well: that when our best footballers went to live and work in England they enjoyed parity of esteem in a fair and pleasant land.This week’s invasion may alter our perspective, crystallising as it has for many of us who are aware of what is good, uniquely so, in the English character, an uneasy feeling that ultimately our affection has been misplaced. We have, in the words of the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh lamenting a lost love:Loved not as I shoulda creature made of clayWhen the angel woosthe clay he’ll losehis wings at the dawn of dayIn James Eager’s face, we saw that look of love betrayed.SADLY, more experienced observers of Wednesday’s ugly theatre were not surprised by the scenes we witnessed. For two decades at least we have known that behind the glamorous faade, English soccer is rotten to the core, providing a fertile environment for spivs, racists, and violent fantasists, administered in the main by the type of person John Betjeman identified as:That man with double chinwho’ll always cheat and always winwho washes his repulsive skinin women’s tearsToo many of the gentlemen who define the values that obtain in James Eager’s beloved illusion conform to that description.

Last Wednesday, as the fans streamed sadly from the stadium, leaving behind the scum, caged yet in command of our game, a pall of despair descended on Lansdowne Road as the inquest began. English journalists wandered around, muttering abjectly of their shame.These men are veterans, not fond of platitudes, nor given to idle expressions of regret Their despair was genuine, poignantly so. They wondered aloud what had become of their game, even more profoundly what has happened to their country. When Graham Kelly, the Football Association’s Chief Executive, appeared to proffer the official line, nobody was inclined towards rigorous interrogation. The problem is bigger than this decent football fan.Listening to Kelly field questions – all of them echoes of so many other nights of shame – I recalled some lines from “Slough”, the Betjeman poem quoted above:But spare the bald young clerks who addthe profits of the stinking cadIt’s not their fault that they are mad,they’ve tasted Hell.It’s not their fault they do not knowthe birdsong from the radioIt’s not their fault they often goTo MaidenheadAnd talk of sports and makes of carsIn various bogus Tudor barsAnd daren’t look up and see the starsBut belch instead.Come friendly bombs and fall on SloughIt isn’t fit for humans now.For Slough, read English football, which is no longer the game of Tom Finney or Bobby Charlton or indeed Alan Shearer, the greatest of contemporary players. The single most potent symbol of English soccer today is Eric Cantona whose malevolent spirit haunted many souls in Dublin last Wednesday night.