Jared Waerea-Hargreaves raged against the dying of the light and won

As the Grand Final entered its last moments, the cameras cut to Jared Waerea-Hargreaves prowling the touchline, the glare of the Old Trafford floodlights accentuating the grey streak of hair on his head. Hull KR were winning 18-6. There was no way back for Wigan, trapped in their own half and the cycle of errors that engulfs a team when they know the game is up.

Whether Waerea-Hargreaves knew it or not, his career as a professional rugby league player was over. He had made his last carry, completed his last tackle, crushed his last opponent. But he had not taken his last breath, and he wasn’t going to let his teammates relent, bellowing at them: “GO GET ‘EM!”

He was so nearly robbed of this moment. An over-the-top ban for an incident that hadn’t even been penalised in Hull KR’s semi-final victory over St Helens had only been overturned at the start of the week. While the judiciary meeting was taking place, Waerea-Hargreaves sat at home for three hours with his kids playing in the front garden, popping their head in the door to keep asking, “Dad, what’s the result?”

“After the disciplinary verdict, I had the vision of not stopping and going out on my terms,” he said after the final whistle confirmed Hull KR’s forty-year trophy drought had been ended with a clean sweep of honours in 2025. “I just wanted to be everywhere. You run around out there knowing it’s your last game. I mean, what a feeling, just to be out there going after every single moment.”

It was a statement ending to a landmark career as one of the most fearsome enforcers of modern rugby league. Sixteen years, 340 club appearances, 33 caps for New Zealand, three NRL Premierships with Sydney Roosters, a Treble in his one and only season with Hull KR, countless disciplinary hearings. As Waerea-Hargreaves bid farewell to the Roosters last year, the Australian writer Nick Campton dubbed him ‘the last of his kind — because he was brought up in a rugby league world that doesn't exist anymore’.

"He's one of the best props in the game and the fact he's still playing is insane; I'm only 26 and I'm starting to feel sore,” Manly prop Taniela Paseka told Campton, adding: "He's relentless, he never shies away, he keeps going. He shows what forwards want, what teams want — the word is ruthless, no matter how the team is going."

In a few months Waerea-Hargreaves turns 37 years old. His form in Super League has unsurprisingly been a far cry from his prime in the NRL. But he saved his best performance of the season for its biggest night.

Hull KR started the game terribly, a bag of nerves. Careless errors offered Wigan the opportunities to win the match in the opening fifteen minutes, only for Liam Farrell and Bevan French to bomb early tries with even more inexplicable fumbles. The Grand Final turned on Wigan hooker Brad O’Neill’s sin-binning for a dangerous tip tackle on Tyrone May — receiving a hefty palm to the face from JWH for taking liberties as well as the yellow card — yet O’Neill made his biggest a few minutes earlier, roughing up Rovers winger Joe Burgess at an innocuous play the ball. O’Neill’s attempts at intimidation only shook KR out of their own heads. With Waerea-Hargeaves on the pitch, they weren’t going to be bullied.

Shortly afterwards, Mikey Lewis’ kick to the corner was knocked down and the ball bounced on the ground. French was always going to get there ahead of Waerea-Hargreaves, but the latter was never interested in the ball anyway, his eyes lighting up at the target of the most talented player on the opposition team. French was wiped out by a shuddering shoulder charge. Waerea-Hargreaves was penalised. Was it legal? Obviously not. Was it necessary? Absolutely. Rugby league might have changed, but sometimes the old rules still apply: if your prop forward has the opportunity to clatter your opposition’s best player, they are duty bound to make the most of it. If they don’t then they’re not doing their job properly.

As French dropped the ball over the KR’s tryline moments later, commentators suggested it was because Mikey Lewis was standing near him. I’m wondering if it was more likely that French was terrified; it might have been Waerea-Hargreaves closing in on him again.

The force of the shoulder charge was indicative of how Waerea-Hargreaves propelled himself into every tackle all night. As Rovers threatened to pen Wigan in their own twenty, they might have been ruing his ill-discipline when he conceded another penalty for a high shot on Abbas Miski after the winger had been rocked towards the turf by a hit from Micky McIlorum, also playing his last ever game even though his fractured ankle was still healing.

But he got it right the third time. Lewis had already put KR ahead with a classy solo try by that point, and as Rovers turned the screw with Wigan temporarily down to twelve and starting a set metres from their own line, Waerea-Hargreaves crunched Liam Marshall and forced the ball free, following up on Kruise Leeming just in case the referee didn’t notice the initial knock on. Four tackles later, Burgess was flying into the corner and, brimming with the confidence of a twelve-point lead that should have been Wigan’s, KR never looked back.

Those first forty minutes were typical of the aura that Waerea-Hargreaves has developed over the last decade and a half. He dared to play as close to the line as possible and, even though he crossed the wrong side of it on a couple of occasions, a Wigan team renowned for being uncompromising seemed spooked for the rest of the game by the menace of someone beating them at their own game. Lewis stole the headlines and was awarded the Rob Burrow Award as man of the match, but my vote would have gone to the grey-haired lunatic in the number 10 shirt.

After all, for one last time Jared Waerea-Hargreaves played as if there was no tomorrow. And when he eventually woke up after the party had finished with a sore head, battered body, and a final winner’s ring on his finger, he could begin the first day of his new life feeling like the most satisfied man on the planet. ⬧