There was silence - then Boozer’s Bank rose up...
DAVE Blyth looks back on winning the league with Firwood Waterloo in 2004...
I’ve had to go back through the records and in my brain to figure things out, but I’ve got a picture now.
From the previous season we had great continuity – Tony Pugh as President, Ian Aitchison (Aitch) as Director of Rugby and Tony (Biff) Handley as club captain.
That was great, but let’s start with the season prior to that
2001/02.
We got relegated from National 2 after a really bad run.
We didn’t handle professionalism well and we had just come off the back of losing and losing.
We were competing against teams that were either fully professional or certainly had more resources than we did. It was soul destroying. A lot of that team started improving and despite having come through the ranks of losing heavily over three years, we managed to stick together as a bunch of mates through the hard times.
So, when our turn of fortunes started happening with the arrival of Phil Winstanley and Aitch coming back, we just stuck together.
And when we started winning, we started enjoying ourselves.
We were just happy that we were not getting battered week in and week out so it was a really strong team spirit that we took into the Championship season.
The season started in September, winning all games, do you have particular memories of that?
Just the fact that we had come off a better season in 2002 / 03 – we came fourth.
So we now a new mindset with new targets and aspirations for the season – Phil Winstanley said that he wanted to picture Biff holding the cup in the last game of the season at home.
That was our target but you never know in the first few weeks of the season how the other teams have prepared.
It was great to hit the season with wins, because we had had a strong summer of training – we had worked really hard and were full of belief.
We were winning and winning well, scoring 40 points, 50 points at times. We just had real confidence and we had a couple of Cup games as well, so we were able to try other players out. It was a great start.
In the Cup we had two good wins against Hull and Preston Grasshoppers but then at the start of November we faced Pertemps Bees.
We were doing well, but Pertemps Bees were a very strong team.
We went down there losing 40-24. They were in a league or two above us but we gave a good account of ourselves, but between us we said “OK, it is not such a bad thing as we can focus on the league now.”
In the run up to the end of year we won all of our games, confidence continuing to grow?
If you look at the teams that we were beating, they were no pushovers, especially the north east teams, Blaydon and Darlington Mowden Park – strong teams.
Fylde were always good; Liverpool St Helens had their rugby league renaissance and our local rivals New Brighton were on the up.
Our chief rival was Halifax who we beat just before Christmas 18-6. That was set up to be a really big game.
I had broken my arm in the home game against Blaydon and was out for six weeks. So to go into Christmas unbeaten was great. We had a few drinks to celebrate a good first half of the season.
You make a broken arm sound like a minor inconvenience...
It was just annoying as I wanted to play all the games. If you play rugby you are going to get injured and I think I have had my fair share and the break was just an innocuous tackle. I cracked my arm and I was annoyed as there was such a great team spirit and I didn’t want to miss out on games.
But it did heal quickly and it was nice that there was an extra break over Christmas to give me a few more weeks to recover, ready for the start of the new year.
What about characters in the team?
We were all mates and we have great memories of stories from the back of the bus that you can’t always tell people! We came from all walks of life – Cheeky from Cameroon, Paul White now a very senior Merseyside Police Officer, Dominic Mackenzie Headmaster of Formby High.
There were also solicitors, mechanics, teachers and barmen – great company to be around. We did enjoy socialising a lot together with the same immature sense of humour.
So we carry on winning into the new year