In The Dugout: DBG Plays Rugby Coach (Part One)

The year is 1991. Wigan have harvested all but one of the major trophies in British Rugby League (Widnes took out the Premiership with a 28-6 win over Bradford at Old Trafford) and remarkably legendary Australian coach John Monie has been shown the Central Park door by Maurice Lindsay. Even more remarkably, the club have appointed untried rookie coach Dan Barker Gray as the new gaffer! 

(I'm of course being theoretical, none of this actually happened mainly due to the fact I was born in 1991!) 

Through the power of the 'classic' C64 game Rugby Coach it's now my job to steady the ship and get Wigan back to the top of the totem pole. 

My first task involves the fact that the game automatically dumps you into the Second Division meaning there are no Good Friday derbies or Roses clashes with Leeds to look forward to, instead my charges will be fighting it out with the likes of Barrow, Doncaster and Ryedale-York. The game is also beset by licencing issues so I don't have the likes of Dean Bell, Shaun Edwards or Andy Platt at my disposal, instead my team is made up of a rag-tag bunch of CPU generated players. 

The grass has been cut, the lines have been marked and there's that wave of optimism that only permeates through the air at the start of a new season. Division One here we come!! (Maybe, perhaps...)

Our season gets off to a less than successful start as we're downed 10-8 by Hull KR at Central Park. In a tight encounter, Rovers drew first blood but we were able to bite back and looked like we'd won the tie as we went 8-6 up with two minutes to go. Unfortunately, the missed conversion proved costly as the Humberside club snatched a winning try in the 80th minute. Annoyed at the manner of the defeat but plenty of positives to take into our next outing. 

Sadly, those positives don't roll over to our trip to Watersheddings as Oldham punish our inability to convert field position from penalties into tries as we're held scoreless for the first and hopefully last time this season (spoiler alert: it isn't). 

Our misery in Greater Manchester continues as we are comprehensively pumped 52-0 by Salford at The Willows. All those positives I took from the Hull KR game are slowly ebbing away. Surely we can turn things around in front of our home fans....

As it happens, we don't as Barrow make their way back to Cumbria with the points after handing us yet another drubbing, this time we're on the wrong end of a 34-8 scoreline. Although we managed to score two late tries to bring a small shred of respectability to the score there's a distinct feeling that it's going to get worse before it gets better. 

The league table doesn't make for happy reading either as we end our first month rock bottom of the table (there was indeed only two divisions in 1991 so we are officially the worst team in the country!). 

As D-Ream will go on to say in a couple of years, things can only get better so join me in the next instalment to see if we can improve and drag ourselves up the table.