Sean McGuire: Dragons can be slain by the Saints

Aug 23 2007 by Sean McGuire, Liverpool Daily Post

BEWARE of fire-breathing Frenchmen this weekend. Catalans Dragons, rugby league’s latest expansion side, are on their way to Wembley to face champions and current holders St Helens in the Challenge Cup Final.

It is a great achievement for the French club, and beating Wigan in the semi-final last month will rank as one of their best games for a long time to come – unless they are able to spring a surprise and lift the trophy this Saturday.

But it would be naive to get carried away with their status as finalists and imagine that it shows they are now a force in the game.

They aren’t.

All it shows is they were able to beat Featherstone, Whitehaven, Hull and Wigan.

Hull at that stage had won just six of their opening 16 league matches while even now Wigan languish in eighth place and are unlikely to make the play-offs.

Just as in 1998 when Sheffield Eagles beat Wigan at Wembley and the following year when London Broncos played Leeds in the last Challenge Cup under the twin towers, to get to the final is a special achievement.

But, as those clubs prove, it is not a lasting one.

Cup finals are said to be a catalyst for a period of success for a club, pointing to theSaints-Bradford final of 1996 as evidence.

Since then the two clubs have won nine of the 11 Super League titles. But in truth reaching the final is a marker of how far a club has already come, not how far it has still to go.

And Catalans Dragons, like last year’s finalists Huddersfield, can be better assessed by their performances in the Super League each week.

They have improved on last year’s 12fth position and could finish as high as eighth. But they are a long way from being serious contenders for the Super League title.

Can Saints be the first team to retain the Challenge Cup since they themselves managed to do it a decade ago?

I hope so, and I expect them to.

They have quality players in every position and the fact that only one, Keiron Cunningham, has ever won at the stadium will be a huge motivating factor.

It will be a fantastic occasion and could be a fascinating game.

Let’s hope the Saints can slay the Dragons.

Henman ultimately just didn’t cut it

‘C’MON Tim, give us one more Wimbledon’ has been the sentimental cry from tennis fans this week with the news that Britain’s best player of the last decade will soon hit his last ball in anger.

It has come as a great shock – I can’t be alone in thinking that he retired a couple of years ago.

Now comes the assessment, the placing of Tiger Tim in the list of great tennis players.

And his place in that list is clear – he didn’t make the cut.

It’s not, as has been suggested, a typically-British reaction based on snobbery because his family are in the legal profession (after all my brother Donal is a barrister and I could beat him at tennis using a croquet mallet) but because, sadly, it’s true.

But instead of being denigrated for his failure to win Wimbledon, or any of the other major championships, Henman should be congratulated for achieving a lot with what was, in terms of elite sport, limited talent. He didn’t have a serve to frighten opponents, a devastating forehand or even the sheer awkwardness of being left-handed.

Instead he had to rely on grit and determination and a very good game to keep him near the top of the tennis world.

And it seems that pending retirement has given him a new nickname.

A Tiger no more, he’s now known as If-only.

If only he’d made it to world number one. If only he’d reached a Grand Slam final. If only he’d won Wimbledon.

He deserves better: to be remembered as a player who not only kept British fans engaged during the second week of Wimbledon for a decade (oh, how he was missed this year), but who showed that you didn’t need trophies to be a winner.

Don’t blame referees

ONCE again Big Brother has been the only topic of conversation in August.

Not the Channel 4 show, which has consistently failed to live up to the standards of handyman Craig in the first series.

Instead it has been video replays – Rob the Builder and the imaginary penalty, as well as Mr Styles’ curious Night Fever dance in front of Michael Essien while clutching the yellow card, that has been the focus of much discussion.

The penalty award was simply a wrong decision but it is one of the vicissitudes of playing sport.

And despite the unbalanced coverage in the Press, the Premier League’s referees have had a far better start to the season than the league’s goalkeepers.

What is less easy to brush off is the issue of cameras fixed on the goal-line.

It seems absurd for football’s bosses to resist the technology any longer, despite the views of wronged Fulham manager Lawrie Sanchez.

He berated the officials at full-time yet describes himself as a traditionalist and opposes the use of goal-line technology – an incongruous position to hold, even for a football manager.

Video replays have done a lot to eradicate violent play in all sports through retrospective action, and have been a great help to officials for line calls in rugby, cricket and tennis.

Football must follow suit.

And then it must move past the occasional wrong decision and begin to seriously address the haranguing of referees and blatant cheating that is endemic in the game and which puts so much unnecessary pressure on the man in the middle.