I have been covering this sport since the days when a concussion was considered a character-building exercise and the pitch at Central Park was composed entirely of frozen mud and shattered dreams. I know what a real rugby match is supposed to look like. It is supposed to look like a miserable, eighty-minute argument between thirty men who all deeply regret their career choices.
So when I sat in the stands on Friday night and watched Wigan Warriors winger Zach Eckersley run in a hat-trick against the Huddersfield Giants, the casual fans around me were on their feet cheering. They saw a rising star cementing a crucial victory. I, however, saw a fundamentally broken moral compass. I saw a young man who has absolutely no respect for the ecosystem of the sport.
Let us look at the facts. The Giants are currently marooned at the bottom of the Super League table. They are a team that exists right now in a state of pure, miserable attrition. When you play a club in that specific kind of pain, you owe them the basic professional courtesy of engaging in a grinding, joyless arm wrestle that ends in a 4-2 scoreline. You do not just run around them three times and put the ball down. It is fundamentally unserious behaviour.
Ask any real fan of the game. They will tell you that the essence of rugby league is not about crossing the whitewash. It is about taking a shoulder to the sternum in the freezing rain on the fourth tackle, getting up with half your teeth missing, and kicking the ball directly out on the full just to give everyone a chance to breathe. That is the heritage Eckersley is disrespecting every time he turns on the afterburners.
Eckersley’s performance completely failed the eye test. Yes, the stat sheet says he scored twelve points. The front office will look at their spreadsheets and print out little graphs showing his line breaks and his finishing percentage. But what does the eye test say?
The eye test says his jersey was far too clean in the sixty-fifth minute. The eye test says he repeatedly chose the path of least resistance by finding gaps in the defensive line, rather than doing the honourable thing and running directly into the heaviest prop forward he could find. You cannot build a winning culture on the back of someone who thinks the objective of the game is to avoid contact.
If a winger of mine scores three tries in a match, he is running laps on Monday morning, because it means he spent the entire afternoon avoiding his fundamental obligation to suffer.
Exactly. What Eckersley demonstrated against Huddersfield was a complete lack of the intangibles that make a true champion. Points are supposed to be a byproduct of suffering, not the primary goal.
I had breakfast with a legendary former league coach last week, and we spent two hours lamenting this exact modern sickness. We talked about how the analytics nerds have ruined the locker room dynamics. They look at a kid like Eckersley and say, “Look at his pace, look at his footwork.” They do not look into his soul to see if he possesses the deep, ancestral desire to drop the ball cold on his own twenty-metre line just to give his forwards an excuse to form a scrum.
When you score a hat-trick, you are essentially stealing work from your own pack. You are telling your teammates, “Sit down, I do not need you to bleed for me today.” It is incredibly selfish. It is the rugby equivalent of load management, outsourcing the hard graft of the game to your own flashy athleticism rather than relying on the collective misery of the squad.
Huddersfield deserves better than what Wigan gave them. When the bottom club in the league shows up to your stadium, you do not humiliate them with fluid, attacking rugby. You stoop to their level. You knock the ball on. You give away six-again penalties for holding down in the tackle. You drag them into the deep water and drown them slowly over eighty excruciating minutes.
Instead, by scoring three times, Eckersley essentially bypassed the foundational misery of the sport. He took a shortcut. And in this league, shortcuts eventually catch up with you. You cannot cheat the rugby gods by simply being faster than the men trying to tackle you.
We are breeding a generation of athletes who genuinely believe crossing the try line is more important than establishing psychological dominance through a zero-metre gain.
The league office needs to step in before this becomes a trend. We cannot have young players watching the highlights and thinking that this is an acceptable way to conduct yourself on a Friday night in Greater Manchester. If we do not nip this in the bud, we are looking at a future where matches routinely feature double-digit scorelines.
It starts with a hat-trick against a struggling Huddersfield side. Next thing you know, players will be passing the ball before taking a hit, or wearing brightly coloured boots, or smiling during a postgame presser. The slippery slope is real, and it is paved with flashy wingers who refuse to get tackled.
I am calling on the Wigan coaching staff to make a statement this week. Bench Zach Eckersley. Send him down to the reserves until he understands that true glory is not found in the in-goal area.
True glory is found at the bottom of a ruck, gasping for air, penalised for a high tackle, wondering why you ever chose to play this ridiculous sport in the first place. Anything else is just empty entertainment, and frankly, I have absolutely no time for it.