ComeOnYouUll:
Wilf touched on this earlier but it had been a crazy couple of months for games.
In March 1985 we played eight games and in the April we played eleven. Nineteen games in eight weeks including a run of ten in eighteen days. Utter madness.
In April we played on 6th, 8th, 10th, 12th, 14th, 17th, 19th, 20th, 21st, 23rd and 28th. This included the Cup semi and the replay. We won five, drew two and lost four of these eleven games.
Not surprisingly we used 43 players that season.
Great post, brilliant information there. It's simply mind-boggling how many games the club had to cram in over such a short period. It seemed to happen to one club every year around that time (usually either Widnes, rovers or ourselves) if they reached both the JP and Challenge cup finals, along with the normal backlog of weather affected postponements. Our situation in '85 wasn't helped, of course, by having replays for both quarter and semi-final ties, what were the odds of that happening within a month!
Let's not forget also that the majority of players would have had day jobs to fit in as well, with the Rugby still a part-time sport back then. Add to that all of the travelling around and preparation I suspect the players didn't know whether they were coming or going at times in April '85! Think it's nothing short of a minor miracle that they only lost four out those eleven games that month.
Clearly times have changed and, as a now full-time sport, that situation is never going to arise again. However I do feel the game has undoubtedly lost something of its soul over the intervening four decades. Obviously no one wants to see a return to nineteen games in eight weeks, that would be ludicrous, but I do feel there is far less of a connectedness between club, players and fans than what there used to be back then. Maybe it's just wistful nostalgia on my part and maybe my younger self was viewing life differently back then, but it seemed to be more 'real' in those days than it does today.
Would also like to echo what a few other posters have said about the weekend forty years ago. No matter how great a game it was, my overriding emotion is still the fact that we lost. I was gutted then and I'm still gutted about it today. I've often thought about those five missed conversions and what could have been! One thing's for sure, none of us would have guessed that afternoon that another twenty years would pass before the next cup final would roll around.
