A fortunate win for Wigan. Did not play to the best of their ability. Huddersfield unfortunate not to come away with the trophy. Still, as a Wigan fan I'll take that.
If Lolohea had his kicking boots on the cup was theirs. I didn't quite understand their tactics of running it on the last tackle to pin Wigan down in their own 20. This may have been acceptable for one or two sets but with the game in the balance, they should have gone for the killer try. I think they had Wigan on their 10 with 8 minutes to go. Score in that moment and Wigan would not have recovered. Naive tactics perhaps, but they were very unfortunate.
I think their tactic of running six tackles and turning over in our ten was to stop Field, French and to a lesser extent Marshall returning kicks into space. They did it throughout the game, not just in the final minutes and it worked in as much as the times our backs were running into broken play were minimal. I also think they were pretty gassed by the 65-70 minute mark (understandably given how hard they worked, and without Hill for the majority of the game) and so figured starting us further back in a controlled manner was preferable to going blow by blow with us for a four-pointer.
I agree Huddersfield were unfortunate given they lost Hill so early, Lolohea missed goal attempts and the fact Smithies didn't get binned for two high shots (particularly the one on Leutele which was arguably a professional foul to boot) but they had a high shot of their own on Farrell go unpunished, we had Cust go off late on, a blatant hand on the ball in a three man tackle lead to one of their first half tries and it was entirely their own decision to not even attempt a try in the last 15 minutes or so and instead attempt to contain us. Given the lateness of our winner of course it's brutal on them but weighing up both sides of the ledger I don't feel we were overly lucky, nor that we 'picked their pockets' or were 'undeserving winners' as I've heard in various forums since the game. When all was said and done they got their noses in front, tried to hang on like grim death in the last 10-15 and very nearly pulled it off, but we won out in the end in a brutally-tough contest in which we were under par, particularly in the first half.
It was great to see the game at the ground, checking out Spurs' cool new facilities (the pints really do fill up from the bottom of the cup!) and obviously so good to get the cup. I'm made up for the players and most of all Peet.
