Quote ="Steve May"To be fair, there was a period of several years where Fartown were on the up and going well. At that point, they had nearly jumped from the Wakey/Widnes/Salford group of clubs into the top group - looking set to replace Bradford.
A couple of things happened within the squad that made things difficult. But the biggest thing for me was that the club - not necessarily the squad - didn’t have the courage to make the step up.
There’s a pivotal moment in the lives of successful people where they choose to step up to another level. It’s not easy to do that, particularly if you have no experience of it. It’s risky. Many people who try to make that step fail (look at Liverpool - they tried and failed under Brendan Rogers, will they succeed under Klopp?). But absolutely everyone who doesn’t take that step fails.
In some organisations taking that step up is an expected part of the organisation. In British RL you’d look to St Helens, Wigan, Leeds when Sinfield was playing. Or the All Blacks, Manchester United under Fergie, Liverpool for about 30 years, Yorkshire CCC for decades until Geoffrey Boycott destroyed the culture.
The others - like Wakey, for example - are pretty much drifting along in an easy and comfortable culture of mediocrity going nowhere.
The thing with Wakefield is that they’ve not been close to that breakthrough moment for fifty years. They’re happy as a club to be the sixth or seventh best in the league in a good year and they don’t appear to have any interest in changing that. Which I can understand - most people run their entire lives on those lines. It’s a comfortable way to live. But then most people aren’t elite sportsmen.
My frustration with the Giants is that they worked bloody hard to get to that big decision point, and then the management of the club went “Nah, better to sit back and tick along as we have done for years.”
They were almost there. If they’d tried and failed, that would be disappointing but forgivable. But the club lacked the guts to try. It’s no surprise that the players, who are the ones who put in the blood and sweat and pain, just gave up and now the club can’t attract decent players.
Such a waste.'"
For me that pivotal moment was when we refused to compete in the World Club Challenge. If I was a player at that time I would have been gutted not to play against an NRL side and as a fan I was gutted we turned down that opportunity to witness us compete against an NRL team. Perhaps that message then sent out that we are happy to settle for less and in some small way has affected the attitudes of people at the club.
