Barbed Wire wrote:
Wrongly scaprgoated, in my opinion:
Wainwright, Myler, Sims, Atkins, Jon Clarke, Rauhihi, Leikvoll, Waterhouse and most recently the 2022 edition (caveated, they everyone was pants to a certain degree) Currie.
Those I’d go along with:
Rodwell, Roberts, fat Sandow, fat Appo, year 1 Michael Monaghan, Tatupu, Mafi, Jason Roach, Michael Eager, Kidwell.
I agree with most of those, but Rodwell was a classic example of a scapegoat in that he was a player who became a lightning rod for dissatisfaction for the failings of the whole team. He was only here for a couple of months and played a handful of games. He wasn't great but he wasn't unusually bad compared to others in that team.
I think there were a few factors which made him a classic scapegoat
1) He was an Aussie and we talked him out of retirement to come here. That's a great way to start off getting people cynical, like these days if you're Albanian and come here on a small boat.
2) Steve Anderson started that season playing Lee Briers at fullback, which meant Rodwell and Domic or Paul Noone (yes you read that right) were playing in the halves instead of him. The fans were not happy, and pointing out our lack of creativity without Briers meant a finger was aimed at Rodwell, rather than Domic and Noone who people knew were not supposed to be there.
3) He had made himself accountable to fans by coming on the club website forum during the pre-season interacting with fans. This meant that he created a rod for his own back because loads of people were saying what a great guy he was and we also had stories in the Warrington Guardian about how Rodwell was really popular around the club with the staff, so once we started losing people want to say "yeah he might be a nice guy BUT..." plus they knew he was going on the club website so they were more likely to post stuff about him there.
4) The fans hated Steve Anderson and this is where the first three points come together, because Rodwell became seen as the public face of the Anderson regime. Anderson was an Aussie, who talked fellow Aussie Rodwell out of retirement, he played him at halfback and pushed fan favourite Lee Briers to fullback, and Rodwell was the one interacting with the fans.
There were a lot of other signings that year who were a big let down, but Rodwell seemed to be the one on whom everyone focused. We signed Dale Laughton, who had been a GB prop just a couple of years earlier, and who was really the biggest signing in the forwards but was obviously a shadow of the player he used to be, but nobody ever seemed to bother about Laughton, I bet a lot of people forget he ever played for Wire. But it did seem strange to me that Rodwell attracted so much more hate.
On the field, my memory of Rodwell is he was just ok. Just passed the ball from side to side, didn't look like a gamebreaker, didn't have a great kicking game, but he didn't stink the joint out to the extent that some of the team were doing at the time. He had started to play better in his final couple of games including an important win at Hull.
