Salford City Reds 32 Warrington Wolves 34

The Easter weekend is a special one for all followers of The Greatest Game. No work (well for most of us) & two games to follow over the weekend together with a feast of televised derby games. I managed to get home from work in time to catch the 2nd half of Leeds' stolen win at Bradford the night before & then it was an early start on Good Friday to get warmed up for the big one.

Good Friday has been a particularly happy time to be a Red in recent years (unless Jesus Christ himself was a Red, I reckon he probably harbours bad memories of Good Friday). The last two have seen maulings of Warrington (one at the Willows, the other at Legoland) both played out on gloriously sunny days. Perfect beer garden weather for toasting memorable victories. The omens on Good Friday were certainly good; Warrington were without several key players (most notably Lee Briers and Adrian Morley) and the walk into Eccles was accompanied by blazing sunshine.

Nevertheless the mood over breakfast in the Eccles Cross was downbeat, most of us were expecting Briers to have made a recovery akin to that of JC himself all those Easters ago and lead Warrington to a win they would have been craving after our whitewash of them last season. However, as these thing always seem to pan out, optimism raised somewhat as the 3rd or 4th pint eased down the throats & we headed onto the short tram journey in very good spirits.

Arriving at the ground we sat outside the church hall with a pint to soak up the early spring sunshine & watch the Wire fans arriving. Mike was adding the finishing touches to a banner we hoped to give the light of day after the hooter which read "Dream On Cullen" (a reference to Cullen's post-match comments a week previously when Cullen responded that his only dream "is to beat Salford on Friday".

We head into the ground early, it would seem a good move as a good crowd is in attendance for this one. As soon as I enter I can see Briers warming up on the park, I fucking knew it! After a nervy opening, we got away to a great start as Wilshere crossed early on & then added the extras brilliantly to give us a 6 point jump-start. The lead wouldn't last long though as Rauhihi's green boots powered him over from close range, Bridge inexplicably missed the goal though & we held a slender lead.

Despite looking very sluggish, we extended our advantage with a Robbo try (again goaled by Wilshere) and we looked set to turn the screw when Wire were reduced to 12 with Leikvoll's sin-binning. However, in a story that's become depressingly familiar, we allowed the Wolves a series of easy yards culminating in a try for Grose right on the hooter (superbly goaled by Briers).

With a full compliment of players almost straight from the re-start, the momentum had swung in Warrington's favour. Even more so when Daley Williams was sin-binned & Fa'afili went over to give Wire the lead for the 1st time. We held out from then until Williams return & then a bit of magic from Dorn put us back in front & the game was heading for a grandstand final 20 minutes. How wrong we were; what followed was a humiliating capitulation as Rauhihi, Wainwright & Bracek were allowed through powder-puff tackling to cross & kill the game effectively. In the final 5 minutes we mounted some token resistance against a side with one eye on their next game no doubt. Some fine open rugby created tries for Littler, Williams & Hodgson. With time against us Wilshere had no time to set himself for the conversions & missed 2 of them meaning that we fell 2 points short at the hooter. However, all that happened was we applied a bit of gloss to the scoreline, the truth was we were well beaten & beaten by our own mistakes rather than good Warrington play. Not such a Good Friday after all.

So we headed straight for the Tavern to get royally drunk & forget the depressing reality of the situation but 1st we had a Wigan v Saints game to look forward to on Sky. After watching an intense 40 minutes of RL in which Saints held an advantage that didn't look safe by any means, our anticipation of the 2nd half was disturbed by the telly being turned over to Citeh v Charlton. After 15 minutes it was clear that it wasn't being turned back and an enquiry at the bar made it clear that their orders were 1st half of the rugby then put Citeh on. All this in a RL ground as well, amazing. A protest had to be led & I felt like just the man to do it, chants of "we all agree, rugby is better than Citeh" met with no response so I went round turning the TV's off. This met with a huge cheer from the assembled crowd but still no turning over. Finally a synchronised drinking up & leaving of the pub had the desired effect as the tedium at Eastlands was changed to the drama at the JJB.

We then headed off to the Height to round off the night, seeing a great band in the Welly & having a good sing-along to them before heading to what we thought was a karaoke night but turned out to just be a shit pub-singer. Oh and some cheeky sod nicked my copy of the really rather excellent RAW issue 1 (buy it now, you know it makes sense) out of my arse pocket when I was stood at the bar. I only hope it was a woman.