: Mon Feb 16, 2009 9:13 am
The Threepennies wrote:
Sorry, you USED to be the biggest! The only proffesional club in the 80's/90's SHOULD have been the biggest, and you were! Not now. It's Saints with Leeds about to take over.
Not that old chestnut!
You actually mean full-time professional rather than professional (the leading RL clubs left behind their amateur status back in 1895....).
Whether or not Leeds or Wigan were the first clubs to get to a "full time" professional position or not is neither here nor there. At the time Wigan went full time (other than Ian Lucas giving up his antique shop!) it wasn't seen as a big news by Wigan fans or anyone else in RL. All the other leading clubs had the majority of their players on full time contracts by then anyway.
This really is a desperately poor anti-Wigan urban legend and the more it gets retold and believed by the gullible as being the reason Wigan dominated the late 80s (when they weren't full time pro) and early-mid 90s the more laughably sad it becomes.
You also lose what little credibility you had left by describing Saints as the biggest club. Given their small fan base Saints haven't been and are not likely ever to be the biggest club in British RL.