Where do they keep coming from?

Where do they keep coming from? For all rugby league on these shores continues teetering on the brink of its self-imposed existential crisis, one aspect remains the same: players keep emerging with a preternatural talent for catching an oval-shaped ball and leaving everyone else – opposition teams, coaches, supporters — gasping for air.

It doesn’t make sense. Super League is run on a whim. Participation numbers in the UK are dwarfed by other sports, let alone the player pool on the other side of the world, where the NRL poaches our biggest stars and is beginning to do the same with the brightest youngsters at the earliest signs of potential.

And yet they keep coming.

Amid the latest power grab and will-they-won’t-they flirtation with NRL investment (you will have to excuse my cynicism for suspecting Peter V’Landys' latest deadline of June is the latest dose of hot air), one of the overlooked storylines of the 2025 Super League season was just how many bloody good rugby league players appeared throughout the competition.

Harry Robertson was the poster boy, a then-teenager whose slight frame suggests he should have been crushed by the grown men he battled against every week yet was slippery and smart enough to evade tackle after tackle until it culminated in St Helens’ miracle at Headingley. Presley Cassell has an altogether different style but arrived fully-formed as if he had just been extracted from a mine of rugby league's purest elements — big build, fast-twitch muscle fibres, terrifyingly deep voice. Judging by their production line, walk down any street in Wigan and you're bound to bump into a handful of 17-year-olds just waiting for their chance to step seamlessly into a Super League set up.

Wherever you look, they are there. Hull FC aren’t particularly good but are full of them, Lewis Martin finishing as the league’s top scorer in a backline that also includes Harvey Barron, Davy Litten and Will Pryce. Huddersfield are absolutely terrible and still have George Flanagan Jr, who looks like he could be knocked over by a strong breeze, which was often the last hope of the defences he had just danced around. It’s not just in this country, either; Guillermo Aispuro-Bichet was the only fun thing about Catalans’ desperate season (so naturally they've dropped him in 2026).

There has been a rotating cast at Warrington. In 2024 it was Leon Hayes, a breath of fresh air as a young English half-back, only for a horrible ankle dislocation to curtail his progress. It was a similar story last year for Arron Lindop, who knackered his ACL a week after having his heart broken at Wembley. Waiting in the background throughout it all, however, was Cai Taylor-Wray.

Were it not for his own injury issues (true to form, just as I was about to hit publish, it has been confirmed he's injured his hamstring), Taylor-Wray might have counted himself among the class of 2025’s leading lights. After finally running out of excuses to indulge his “good friend” Matt Dufty, Sam Burgess sent Dufty packing in the off-season and handed the number 1 shirt to Taylor-Wray, who is quickly making up for any lost time.

‘Quickly’ is the operative word when it comes to the full-back. When he returns a kick it is like a trigger has been pulled by a quivering hand; the direction of travel may be wayward, but the propulsion is explosive, as best displayed by his evisceration of Jack Welsby in Warrington’s round one win over St Helens:

He was back at it again in their most recent victory, against York. Having beaten three players to score a first-half try, Taylor-Wray ruined his own earlier good work by sloppily losing possession as York scored during a rapid fire comeback. For a brief moment after the break it appeared he was about to make a similar mistake as he nervously let a high kick bounce. Then he set off.

Some players are deceptively fast, gracefully gliding across the turf until their pace only becomes evident in relation to the opponents left in their wake. When Taylor-Wray puts his foot on the accelerator, you can almost hear the revs of a straining engine and sniff the fumes singing your nostrils. His run at York dragged Warrington from one end of the pitch to the other, from right to left to right-left-right, and by the time Ben Currie crashed over to score from the resulting field position, Taylor-Wray was pictured in backfield still blowing out of his arse, staggering around like a drunk, making it impossible to work out whether the cloud around his head was the fog of his breath in the cold air or steam coming from his ears.

Only three players — all NRL imports — have run for more than Taylor-Wray’s 603 metres in Super League so far this season. Nobody even comes close to his (quite frankly ludicrous) average gain of 12.06 metres per carry. The boy was born to run, and when you’re as quick as him, why would you ever stop? Keep it up, and it won’t be long before there are calls for the 20-year-old to add some X-factor to England’s listless attack and questions whether he’s the guy to finally deliver a title to Warrington. Let’s face it, it’s never their year. But it might just be Cai Taylor-Wray’s, whether Super League knows what to do with him or not. ⬧