sally cinnamon wrote:
Last year was much more gutting than this but overall nothing has ever come close to the disappointment (for me) of losing the playoff to Hull in 2005 with Johns in our team, that was the worst ever day for me as a Wire fan.
I disagree. That was the first in a quartet of lows for me, the others being Huddersfield 2010, Leeds last year and now tonight. As each time we have got that little bit closer before being kicked in the teeth it has got that little bit harder to take too.
If I'm honest, although I did expect to win that Hull game, and believed Andrew Johns gave us a slight chance later on too, I didn't REALLY expect us to beat Saints, Leeds or Bradford and consoled myself with that. Similarly with Huddersfield 2010, yes I expected to win that game, and I had a dream of ending the hoodoo in the final game at Knowsley Road the following week, I knew that in all probability yet another defeat to Saints would have been on the cards as it was for Huddersfield.
Last year and this year were different from those two. I genuinely believed we could be champions and we aren't. And that hurts more than anything that has gone before it.
I endured years of Warrington mediocrity, but in truth defeats didn't hurt as much back then because they were expected. The concept of actually winning trophies was laughable, so failing to win them made very little emotional impact. I just turned up, watched the match, enjoyed a couple of pints and went home. Wins were obviously more enjoyable, but defeats were shrugged off and quickly forgotten about.
Now they hurt. Big time.
Yes, we could win it next year, or the year after. We could even find ourselves in a decade from now in a Leeds type position of winning six finals from seven appearances in nine seasons. On the flip side though, we might not win it at all, and the desperation to simply do it once is getting harder and harder to take with each passing failure to do so.