If Wigan are going to be so good then can they at least have the decency to make me hate them?

It took a good few years for me to truly feel how every rugby league supporter should feel towards Wigan.

When I first started following Leeds, the Rhinos were young upstarts whose main rivals were our near neighbours Bradford. The Bulls were both the literal and metaphorical powerhouse of the early Super League, dominating the competition with a side full of frighteningly large humans who trampled over teams in a style befitting their club’s moniker. Upon gaining the ascendency over Bradford, Leeds then became embroiled in one of the great rivalries of the modern era. St Helens were an altogether different challenge, stacked with serial trophy winners, classy internationals, and six different Man Of Steel winners. Between 2007 and 2009, they met in three consecutive Grand Finals. Such familiarity bred a genuine contempt. Players from both clubs are now on record saying they hated each other so deeply it completely derailed England’s 2008 World Cup campaign, with the squad divided between the Leeds and St Helens camps that were supposed to form the nucleus of the national team.

So it was to my surprise that one evening in the middle of that Leeds vs Saints rivalry I stood on the terrace of Headingley’s South Stand celebrating another exhilarating win when I turned to see an elderly fan standing unimpressed, almost frothing at the mouth as he barked at his friends: “I want Wigan beyt! I want Wigan beyt!”

Wigan? Why Wigan? Sure, they’d been something of a bogey team for Leeds, at least in the regular season, but they were never a real threat. They'd been so worried about the genuine danger of relegation in 2006 that they had to cheat the salary cap out of sheer desperation, and even when they gained a surer footing following the appointment of our old Bradford adversary Brian Noble as head coach, Leeds still had a handy knack of beating them when it mattered in the play-offs. Clearly that wasn’t enough to appease an older vintage of Leeds supporter who suffered through Wigan’s heyday of the 1990s, when they became the one club non-rugby league fans could name.

But then something changed. Noble was replaced by Michael Maguire as coach in 2010, and Wigan became a problem. With Maguire introducing the cynical wrestling and spoiling tactics that had made Melbourne Storm the dominant team in the NRL, Wigan did to Leeds what Leeds had done to Bradford and St Helens. They knocked us off our perch. Maguire wasn’t the face of Wigan’s villainy, however. It was the players. The Tomkins brothers, Michael McIlorum, Gareth Hock. They were a serious set of bastards, whose crimes ranged from Sam Tomkins flicking the Vs at Leeds fans at the 2011 Challenge Cup final (good-natured pantomime fun I’d have admired had any Leeds player done it to their supporters) to Ben Flower’s disgraceful assault on a defenceless Lance Hohaia in the 2014 Grand Final (that can be filed under ‘do that on a Saturday night in town and you end up behind bars’).

What made it all far, far worse was the fact that they were bloody good, too. And that was before Shaun Wane took over from Maguire and gave even more trophies a harsh Lancastrian voiceover that the writer Geoffrey Moorhouse — a Wigan fan himself — summed up in his collection of rugby league essays ‘At The George’:

There is also, I am sorry to say, a distinctively Wigan sound, a prolonged moan that might be caused by acute belly-ache...

But something has changed once more. Having won two consecutive titles and as current holders of every possible trophy in club rugby, this Wigan team of 2025 should be at its malevolent peak. Nothing is more easy to hate than success. Yet for some reason, I just can’t bring myself to do it. And nobody is more disturbed by that than me. Simply acknowledging it as a thought, let alone committing it to page, makes me feel dirty enough to need a shower.

There is, I suppose, a lot to like about this Wigan team. In Jai Field and Bevan French, they have Super League’s two bonafide superstars, gamebreakers who capture lightning and do things few other players can on a weekly basis. Their forward pack are as big and athletic and aggressive as all typical Wigan packs, if not more so, but with a controlled intensity that does without the unhinged lunacy of previous grubs like Micky McIlorum or Gareth Hock, laying the platform for a three-quarter line that are fast and skilful and contains in Jake Wardle one of the last of a dying breed of thoroughbred centres. (Having cried out of his Leeds contract because he couldn’t get in the team at hooker ahead of a rookie loose-forward, Kruise Leeming can still get tae fuck, mind.)

Most disturbingly of all, in last Friday’s demolition of Hull FC I even began to develop a begrudging appreciation of Harry Smith, one of the final remnants of Old Wigan, a gobby scrum-half with a taste for the occasional cheap shot when he feels like he’s got enough big lads around to protect him. Smith’s skillset has a far lower ceiling than the likes of French or Field, so it was always easy to write him off as a water carrier being dragged along by the talents of the stars around him, or as an international who only gets picked for England because of Shaun Wane’s preference for anyone who can make ‘that distinctively Wigan sound’. But while the usual big names stole the headlines once more at Hull, Smith was quietly brilliant, bossing his teammates around the pitch, digging into the defensive line before passing to provide French and Field the time and space to run riot, and generally displaying all the qualities I have been yearning to see from a Leeds number seven for years.

The man to blame for all this perversity is head coach Matt Peet, who never played rugby professionally and has instead studiously risen through the coaching ranks at the club, making a seamless transition to the top job and sweeping all before him in the space of 66 games. When Peet was first appointed as a relative unknown to anyone outside of the town, I started listening to an in-depth interview with him and had to quickly turn it off when he began talking about studying English at university and his love of reading, coming across as a thoroughly decent bloke while doing so. The last thing I wanted was to start liking the coach of Wigan.

Since then, Peet has only made that problem worse, always respectful in his post-match interviews and never spitting his dummy out when Wigan lose, choosing to praise the opposition instead. As a result, I’ve tried to avoid any interviews with him in the last few years, at least until last week, when I couldn’t resist clicking on the following headline:

Wigan Warriors boss sends 'look at yourselves' message to Man Utd and Jim Ratcliffe after troubled period

I've always got time for someone slagging off Manchester United. Albeit Peet wasn't really doing that. That's not his style. Yet again, he was speaking like a man I’d love to have a pint with, discussing the social responsibility Wigan as a club have towards their local community at a time when billionaire Jim Ratcliffe is sacking as many people on minimum wage as he can down the road at Old Trafford:

“I think any sports team, organisation, but particularly here where it is the heartbeat of the town, I think you have a responsibility to one, carry yourself in a certain way, try to make those people proud, and know that you’re affecting a lot of people’s weekends. But also, can you go deeper than that? Can you get your hands dirty with the nitty gritty of the town?

“We’re in a privileged position, a very privileged position. So, how do we want to use it? Is it just to take their money at the end of the week and hopefully we get a good atmosphere, or is it to leave a legacy? There are a lot of issues in this town, so the rugby club doing well shouldn’t mask the fact that mental health issues are through the roof, child poverty is through the roof. There’s a lot of issues that we can’t just ignore.”

It’s at this point I start to feel less guilty about liking Matt Peet, because let’s face it, he seems like a really good bloke, doesn’t he? But if his Wigan team are going to continue to insist on being so bloody good on the pitch, then can he at least do the decent thing and make his players a bit more odious? Nobody has to go full Ben Flower, but it’s about time Liam Farrell gets back to dropping his knees on players scoring a try, or maybe Harry Smith can swear at me the next time he comes to Headingley. At least have the good grace to beat us in heartbreaking fashion after a dodgy ref’s call and rub it in our faces. Then we can all rest assured that future generations of Leeds fans can celebrate inconsequential wins on the terrace of the South Stand while I spitefully growl into my pint: “I want Wigan beyt!” ⬧